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Historical Background and Discovery of Cell - Class 11 Biology Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and Paracelsus, two ancient Greek philosophers, believed that the complex structure of animals and plants is made up of a few repeating elements. These were an organism's macroscopic structures, such as roots, leaves, and flowers for plants, and organs for animals. Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), a Swiss biologist, researched the structure of a kind of protists termed foraminifera after the introduction of magnifying lenses in 1558. The compound microscope, invented in 1590 by Francis Janssen and Zacharias Janssen, aided in the advancement of cell biology research. Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), an Italian microanatomist, examined thin slices of animal tissues from organs such as the brain, kidney, spleen, and lungs, as well as plant tissues, and proposed that they were made up of structural units he called "utricles." Cell was coined by Robert Hooke (1635-1703), an English microscopist (c