The nucleus introduced

Now is an opportune moment to address the confluence of cell biological form and function that is the nucleus. Its arrival is especially timely because the recognition that the nucleus is extremely dynamic has now been solidly established as a paradigm shift over the past two decades, and also because we now see on the horizon numerous ways in which organization itself, including gene location and possibly self-organizingbodies, underlies nuclear functions. “We have entered the cell, the Mansion of our birth, and started the inventory of our acquired wealth.” —Albert Claude When I first read that morsel from AlbertClaude’s 1974 Nobel Prize lecture it seemed Solomonic wisdom, as it indeed was. Though he was referring to cell biology en toto, the study of the nucleus was then at a tipping point and new advances were just at hand. Since then, the nucleus field has literally nucleated and we are now at a position to both admire the recent past and register excite-ment about the present and where the nucleus field may be headed. THE NUCLEUS DISCOVERED We cannot know who first saw the nucleus but we do know that the father of optical microscopy, Antony van Leeuwenhoeck, did so with amphibian and avian erythrocytes in 1710 and that in 1781 Felice Fontana did so as well in eel skin cells. More definitive accounts followed by Franz Bauer, who in 1802 sketched orchid cells and pointed out the nucleus (Bauer 1830–1838), as well as by Jan Purkyně, who described it as the vesicula germanitiva in chicken oocytes (Purkyne ̌ 1825), and Robert Brown who observed it in a variety of plant cells (Brown 1829–1832), earning additional fame for coining the term “nucleus ” (for excellent accounts of these early descriptions of the nucleus see Gall 1996; Harris 1999). Of course, these early observations did not ascribe particu-lar significance to this structure, the given name simply conveying its central location. Later, the nucleus was increasingly observed and became, with some prescience, a key tenet of the cell theory. The nucleus remained a rather lonely item in the eukaryotic cell’s parts list for man