Edouard Van Beneden

Édouard Joseph Louis Marie Van Beneden was a Belgian embryologist, cytologist and marine biologist. 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.
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..

Publications

Recherches sur la composition et la signification de l'œuf 1868
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 1875
Family

Van Beneden's father, Pierre-Joseph van Beneden was also a well-known biologist. He introduced two important terms into evolutionary biology and ecology: mutualism and commensalism.