Karl Vogt

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Carl Christoph Vogt (July 5, 1817 in Gießen, Germany – May 5, 1895 in Geneva, Switzerland) was a German scientist who emigrated to Switzerland. Vogt published a number of notable works on zoology, geology and physiology. All his life he was engaged in politics, in the German Frankfurt Parliament of 1848-9 and later in Switzerland.

During his time with Louis Agassiz in Neuchâtel he discovered--in 1842--the mechanism of apoptosis, the programmed cell death, in studying the development of the tadpole of the midwife toad (Alytes obstetricians). Charles Darwin mentions Vogt's support for the theory of evolution in the introduction to his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Karl Marx criticized Carl Vogt in his book Herr Vogt (1860).

[edit] References

• Untersuchungen über die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Geburtshelferkröte. (Alytes obstetricians), Solothurn: Jent und Gassman, (1842), pp 130

[edit] External links

• Short biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science