How big is a cell?

FEB 01, 1951

Although a knowledge of the dimensions and volumes of living cells is fundamental to a proper understanding of biological processes, science has provided no means for their accurate measurement. Physicists, whose specialty is the measuring of small things, might provide a real contribution, the author suggests, by applying their techniques and skills to the problem.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3067144

Joseph G. Hoffman

How big is a cell? Or, how big are any of the parts of a cell as one sees them through a microscope? Scientists today are as far away from the answer to these questions as they were over a century ago because the available technical means are still inadequate to cope with the problem. The questions were asked immediately with the discovery that living systems comprised cells, which were found to be basic units that anyone could see in plants and animals. Everywhere one looked in the plant and animal kingdom were cells of all manner and shape, and in an era that was dominated by the orderliness superposed on the natural world by Newtonian mechanics it seemed natural to want to measure cells.

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More about the authors

Joseph G. Hoffman, Roswell Park Memorial Institute, and School of Medicine, University of Buffalo, Colorado.