Édouard Joseph Louis Marie Van Beneden (5 March 1846 in Leuven – 28 April 1910 in Liège) was a Belgian embryologist, cytologist and marine biologist.Dictionary of Biography Page 141 Houghton Mifflin Company - 2003 "Beneden, Edouard Joseph Louis-Marie van 1846–1910 * Belgian cytologist and embryologist Born in Liege," He was professor of zoology at the University of Liège. He contributed to cytogenetics by his works on the roundworm Ascaris. In this work he discovered how chromosomes organized meiosis (the production of gametes).
He is son of Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden, a zoologist and paleontologist.
Van Beneden elucidated, together with Walther Flemming and Eduard Strasburger, the essential facts of mitosis, where, in contrast to meiosis, there is a qualitative and quantitative equality of chromosome distribution to daughter cells. (See karyotype)."Investigation of other materials (amphibians, mammals, plants) as regards the ubiquitous occurrence of indirect nuclear division" Published by Walther Flemming published in German by Springer-Verlag in 1880 in Archiv für Mikroskopische Anatomie, Volume 18. Pages 151-259. Translation published in The journal of Cell Biology Volume 25, 1965 La maturation de l'oeuf, la fecondation, et les premieres phases du développement embryonnaire des mammifères, d'aprés des recherches faites chez le lapin : communication préliminaire in Bulletins de l'Académie royale de Belgique. 2me.série; 40(12) 1875
Publications Recherches sur la composition et la signification de l'œuf 1868 Full text available from Archive.org PDF La maturation de l'oeuf, la fecondation, et les premieres phases du développement embryonnaire des mammifères, d'aprés des recherches faites chez le lapin : communication préliminaire in Bulletins de l'Académie royale de Belgique. 2me.série; 40(12) 1875
Family Van Beneden's father, Pierre-Joseph van Beneden (18091894) was also a well-known biologist. He introduced two important terms into evolutionary biology and ecology: mutualism and commensalism.Boucher D.H. 1985. The idea of mutualism, past and future. In D.H. Boucher (ed) The biology of mutualism: ecology and evolution. Oxford University Press. 128
References
Sources
Hamoir, Gabriel. "La révolution évolutionniste en Belgique: du fixiste Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden à son fils darwiniste Édouard", Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2001.