Felix Anton DohrnFRSFRSE (29 December 1840 – 26 September 1909) was a prominent German Darwinist and the founder and first director of the first zoological research station in the world, the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy. 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]
In 1874 Dohrn married sixteen-year-old Maria Baranowska, a refugee from Poland whom he had met in Messina. They had four children Boguslaw, Wolfgang, Harald and Reinhard. Due to her linguistic abilities, Maria became a successful translator.
Tania Dohrn née Givago, wife of Reinhard Dohrn
The Dohrn family. Anton, Maria and their four sons Boguslaw, Wolfgang, Harald und Reinhard.
Entomology
Dohrn was initially interested in Hemiptera. 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". At this time, he became associated with the English scientific establishment through his father's friendship with Henry Tibbats Stainton. In 1866, he published a paper on fossil insects Zur Kenntniss der Insecten in den Primärformationen.[3] In this he describes Eugereon boeckingi (Palaeodictyoptera).
His ideas changed in 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.
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".
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.[2][4]
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).[5] 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.
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.
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.[6] These facilities were supplied with no strings attached, in the sense that investigators were completely free to pursue their own projects and ideas.
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.
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.
Carl Gegenbaur was a German anatomist and professor who demonstrated that the field of comparative anatomy offers important evidence supporting of the theory of evolution. As a professor of anatomy at the University of Jena (1855–1873) and at the University of Heidelberg (1873–1903), Carl Gegenbaur was a strong supporter of Charles Darwin's theory of organic evolution, having taught and worked, beginning in 1858, with Ernst Haeckel, eight years his junior.
Sir Edwin Ray Lankester was a British zoologist.
Étienne-Jules Marey was a French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer.
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".
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.
The Varna Aquarium or Aquarium Varna is a public aquarium in Varna, Bulgaria's largest city on the Black Sea coast.
Emil Otto Zacharias was a German zoologist and plankton researcher, asd well as popularizer of science and journalist.
The hydrology of the Strait of Messina accommodates a variety of populations of marine organisms. The intense currents and characteristic chemistry of the waters of the Strait determine an extraordinary biocoenosis in the Mediterranean Sea with a high abundance and diversity of species; the Strait of Messina, therefore constitutes an area of fundamental importance for biodiversity. Intense and alternate currents, the low temperature and an abundance of transported nitrogen and phosphorus transported to the surface from deep waters supports both pelagic and coastal benthic populations in a cycle of organic substance.
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.
Ernest William MacBride FRS was a British/Irish marine biologist, one of the last supporters of Lamarckian evolution.
Hugo Eisig was a German marine zoologist.
William Alford Lloyd (1826–1880) was an English self-taught zoologist who became the first professional aquarist.
John Dow Fisher Gilchrist (1866–1926) was a Scottish ichthyologist, who established ichthyology as a scientific discipline in South Africa. He was instrumental in the development of marine biology in South Africa and of a scientifically based local fishing industry.
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.
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.
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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