Felix Anton DohrnFRSFRSE (29 December 1840 – 26 September 1909) was a prominent German Darwinist and the founder and first director of the first marine-biological and zoological research station in the world, the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy. The institution became a centre for the exchange of biological ideas through the network of visitors from around the world. He worked on embryology and examined vertebrate origins in terms of functional phylogeny and proposed a principle of succession of functions in 1875 on how one organ could become the basis for the evolution of another of an entirely different function. He was an elected International Member of the American Philosophical Society.[1] The institution transitioned from a private one to a public Italian organization through the subsequent management by his son Reinhard Dohrn.
The Dohrn family. Anton, Maria and their four sons Boguslaw, Wolfgang, Harald and Reinhard.
Dohrn was born in Stettin (Szczecin), PrussianProvince of Pomerania, into a wealthy middle-class family. His grandfather, Heinrich Dohrn, had been a wine and spicemerchant, and had made the family fortune by trading in sugar and a director of the sugar refinery Pommersche Provinzial Zuckersiederei. This wealth and advice from Alexander von Humboldt, allowed Anton's father, Carl August (1806-1892), to devote himself to his various hobbies; travelling, folk music and insects. Anton, the youngest son, read zoology and medicine at various German universities (Königsberg, Bonn, Jena and Berlin). The attitudes of his father, a liberal one with interest in people, literature, music (Felix Mendelssohn was his godfather[2]) and science was to have a key role in Dohrn's own work as a promoter of scientific collaboration. His brother Heinrich Wolfgang Ludwig Dohrn was also a zoologist.[3]
Entomology and marine life
Dohrn received an early education which was based on humanist ideals. He went to study medicine and zoology and Koenigsberg, Bonn, Jena and Berlin. was initially interested in Hemiptera.[4] In 1859, he published Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Harpactoridae in Entomologische Zeitung and the more important Catalogus hemipterorum. He gained his doctorate from Breslau in November 1865 with his thesis "On the Anatomy of Hemiptera". He visited Heligoland along with Ernst Haeckel to examine marine organisms for the first time. Haeckel talked about a zoological station at this time. In 1867 Dohrn visited Millport, Isle of Cumbrae as a guest of David Robertson (1806-1896) who had founded the Millport Biological Station. During this period he became associated with the English scientific establishment through his father's friendship with Henry Tibbats Stainton. He also met Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895). In 1866, he published a paper on fossil insects Zur Kenntniss der Insecten in den Primärformationen.[5] In this he describes Eugereon boeckingi (Palaeodictyoptera). He became a privatdozent at Jena in 1868.[6]
Introduction to Darwinism
Anton Dohrn and other naturalists in Heligoland (1865). Standing left to right Richard Greef, Bonn; Ernst Haeckel, Jena. Sitting, left to right: Salverda, Delft; Pietro Marchi, Florence
Dohrn's ideas of zoology changed in the summer 1862 when he returned to study at Jena, where Ernst Haeckel introduced him to Darwin's work and theories. Dohrn became a fervent defender of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. He saw comparative anatomy, physiology and embryology as means to determine the evolutionary history of various organisms.[6]
At that time comparative embryology was the keystone of morphological evolutionary studies, based on Haeckel's recapitulation theory, the idea that an organism during its embryonic development passes through the major stages of the evolutionary past of its species. Morphology became one of the major ways in which zoologists sought to expand and develop Darwinian theory in the latter years of the 19th century. Dohrn chose to become a "Darwinian morphologist".
Dohrn's view of Haeckel's philosophical generalizations changed after he read Immanuel Kant and F. A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus (1866).[6]
Principle of succession of functions
Among Dohrn's most highly cited theoretical contributions was his so-called "principle of succession of functions". It was derived from pre-existing ideas, especially those that had been proposed by the comparative anatomist St. George Mivart. Dohrn's ideas on functional phylogenetics underlie some of the embryological hypotheses such as the origin of the vertebrate jaw from gill arches. In his original writings he claimed that gill slits had changed into a variety of vertebrate organs.[3][7]
Development of "zoological stations"
Work stations in the Naples laboratory in 1901
From 1850 to 1852, the zoologist and geologist Carl Vogt had lived in Nice where he tried unsuccessfully to enlist support for a marine zoological station (one was later established as Observatoire Oceanologique de Villefranche).[8] The use of marine organisms as models for study had been promoted in Germany by Johannes Peter Müller (1801-1858). The Straits of Messina were known for their richness and had been studied by Spallanzani and August D. Krohn in the past. In Messina, Dohrn and Miklouho-Maclay conceived a plan to cover the globe with a network of zoological research stations, analogous to railway stations, where scientists could stop, collect material, make observations and conduct experiments, before moving on to the next station. In 1859-60 Haeckel and his students described 144 new species of Radiolaria collected in the waters. For a while Messina came to be called the "Mecca of the German Privat-Dozent." It was Miklouho-Maclay who introduced Dohrn to the Russian-Polish de Baranowski family. In 1874 Dohrn married their eldest daughter, sixteen-year-old Maria Baranowska.[6] They had four children Boguslaw, Wolfgang, Harald and Reinhard. Due to her linguistic abilities, Maria became a successful translator.
Dohrn realised how useful it would be for scientists to arrive at a location and find a ready to use laboratory. Dohrn rented two rooms for the "Stazione Zoologica di Messina", but quickly realized the technical difficulties of studying marine life without a permanent structure and support facilities, such as trained personnel and a library.
In 1870 Dohrn decided that Naples would be a better place for his Station. This choice was due to the greater biological richness of the Gulf of Naples and also to the possibility of starting a research institute of international importance in a large university town that itself had a strong international element.
After a visiting a newly opened aquarium in Berlin, the Berliner Aquarium Unter den Linden he decided that charging the general public to visit an aquarium might earn the laboratory enough money to pay a salary for a permanent assistant. Naples, with a population of 500,000 inhabitants, was one of the largest and most attractive cities of Europe and also had a considerable flow of tourists (30,000 a year) that could potentially visit the aquarium.
Dohrn overcame the doubts of the city authorities and persuaded them to give him, free-of-charge, a plot of land at the sea edge, in the beautiful Villa Comunale on the condition that he promised to build the Stazione Zoologica at his own expense.
He opened the station to visiting scientists in September 1873, and to the general public in January 1874.
In 1875 Dohrn published Der Ursprung der Wirbelthiere und das Princip des Functionswechsels: Genealogische Skizzen which proposed the "change of function" theory of the origin of vertebrates. He suggested that an organ could have secondary functions in addition to their primary function and that the subsidiary functions could become primary over evolutionary time.
The "Bench" system
In order to promote the international status of the Stazione and to guarantee its economic and hence political independence and freedom of research, Dohrn introduced a series of innovative measures to finance his project. Firstly, the rental of work and research space (the "Bench system"), for an annual fee universities, governments, scientific institutions, private foundations or individuals could send one scientist to the Stazione for one year where he or she would find available all that was required to conduct research (laboratory space, animal supply, chemicals, an exceptional library and expert staff). He contributed his own library and obtained donations of books from publishers and authors, including Darwin.[9] These facilities were supplied with no strings attached, in the sense that investigators were completely free to pursue their own projects and ideas.[10]
This system worked so that when Anton Dohrn died in 1909 more than 2,200 scientists from Europe and the United States had worked at Naples and more than 50 tables-per-year had been rented out. It might be said that international scientific collaboration in the modern sense was born at the Stazione, based on quick and free communication of ideas, methods and results.
Dohrn's name has been immortalised in an undersea feature, the Anton Dohrn Seamount, a seamount in the Rockall Trough, to the north-west of the British Isles, which has become known for the great biodiversity which lives on the cold-water coral, Lophelia pertusa, in this region.
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
Embryo drawing is the illustration of embryos in their developmental sequence. In plants and animals, an embryo develops from a zygote, the single cell that results when an egg and sperm fuse during fertilization. In animals, the zygote divides repeatedly to form a ball of cells, which then forms a set of tissue layers that migrate and fold to form an early embryo. Images of embryos provide a means of comparing embryos of different ages, and species. To this day, embryo drawings are made in undergraduate developmental biology lessons.
Sir Edwin Ray Lankester was a British zoologist.
Étienne-Jules Marey was a French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer.
Nicholai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay was a Russian explorer of Ukrainian origin. He worked as an ethnologist, anthropologist and biologist who became famous as one of the earliest scientists to settle among and study indigenous people of New Guinea "who had never seen a European".
John Zachary Young FRS, generally known as "JZ" or "JZY", was an English zoologist and neurophysiologist, described as "one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century".
The University Marine Biological Station Millport (UMBSM) was a higher education institution located on the island of Great Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, and run by the university of London (of which it was a central academic body). It closed in 2013 and is now Millport Field Centre, run by the Field Studies Council.
Ernest Everett Just was a pioneering biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. In his work within marine biology, cytology and parthenogenesis, he advocated the study of whole cells under normal conditions, rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting.
Adolf Naef was a Swiss zoologist and palaeontologist who worked on cephalopods and systematics. Although he struggled with academic politics throughout his career and difficult conditions during World War I and II, his work had lasting influences on the fields of phylogenetics, morphology, and embryology.
The Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn is a research institute in Naples, Italy, devoted to basic research in biology. Research is largely interdisciplinary involving the fields of evolution, biochemistry, molecular biology, neurobiology, cell biology, biological oceanography, marine botany, molecular plant biology, benthic ecology, and ecophysiology.
Nicolaus Kleinenberg was a Baltic German zoologist and evolutionary morphologist.
Emil Otto Zacharias was a German zoologist and plankton researcher, as well as popularizer of science and journalist.
Anton Dohrn was a motor yacht built during 1911 and delivered to the Carnegie Institution of Washington in June 1911 for use at its Department of Marine Biology laboratory at Dry Tortugas, Florida. The institution leased the vessel to the United States Navy for use as a patrol boat during World War I to serve as USS Anton Dohrn 5 October 1917 – 2 January 1919. The vessel remained in service for the institution until 1940 when Anton Dohrn was given to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution which used the vessel until 1947 for work between the Gulf of Maine and New Jersey. In 1947 the vessel was sold for use as a mail boat between New Bedford and Cuttyhunk Island.
Hugo Eisig was a German marine zoologist.
William Alford Lloyd was an English self-taught zoologist who became the first professional aquarist.
Arthur Willey FRS was a British-Canadian zoologist.
Paolo Panceri was an Italian naturalist. Panceri graduated in medicine at the University of Pavia where he began his research. In 1861 he took the Chair of Comparative anatomy at the University of Naples, where he directed the Zoology Museum. Panceri was cautious about the scientific validity of evolutionary theories but was instrumental in the foundation of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn. His findings on the bioluminescence of marine invertebrates and studies of Amphioxus led to fame in Italy and abroad. In 1874 he sold his books and scientific papers to Biblioteca Universitaria di Napoli to pay for an expedition to Egypt. They constitute an example of a nineteenth-century library specializing in the natural sciences and comparative anatomy. His students in Naples include Carlo Emery, Leopoldo Maggi and Antonio della Valle. He died aged 44.
Giuseppe Montalenti was an Italian geneticist and zoologist. He was a genetics professor at the University of Naples and at the Sapienza University of Rome. He was elected a member of Accademia dei Lincei (1951).
Alexei Nikolaevich Severtsov was a Russian and Soviet evolutionary zoologist who worked on comparative anatomy and morphology. He was the son of the zoologist Nikolai Severtzov. He studied the evolution of vertebrates and established an institute for evolutionary morphology which is now named after him as the AN Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution. He introduced various concepts of phyloembryology and evolutionary physiology.
Rinaldo Dohrn or in the German form Reinhard Dohrn was a zoologist, the son of Anton Dohrn he took up directorship of the Zoological Station of Naples in 1909 following the death of his father.
↑ Groeben, Christiane (2020). "Marine Biology Studies at Naples: The Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn". In Matlin, Karl S.; Maienschein, Jane; Ankeny, Rachel A. (eds.). Why study biology by the sea?. Convening science: discovery at the marine biological laboratory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp.29–66. ISBN978-0-226-67276-2.
Theodor Heuss (in German: 1940) Anton Dohrn in Neapel. Atlantis-Verlag, Berlin; Rainer Wunderlich, Tübingen 1948 and 1962 (Title now: "Anton Dohrn"); in English 1991, transl. by Liselotte Dieckmann, ed. Christiane Gröben Anton Dohrn. A Life for Science Springer, NY ISBN0-387-53561-6 Springer, Berlin ISBN3-540-53561-6
Daum, Andreas W.Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848–1914. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998, ISBN3-486-56337-8.
Musgrave, A. 1932 Bibliography of Australian Entomology 1775 - 1930. Sydney
Semenov-Tjan-Schanskij, A. P. 1909 [Dohrn, F. A.] Revue Russe d'Entomologie 9
Groeben, Christiane (1985). "Anton Dohrn: The Statesman of Darwinism: To Commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Anton Dohrn". Biological Bulletin. 168 (Supplement: The Naples Zoological Station and the Marine Biological Laboratory: One Hundred Years of Biology): 4–25. doi:10.2307/1541316. JSTOR1541316.
Naval History And Heritage Command. "Anton Dohrn". Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. Naval History And Heritage Command. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
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