Question

The term mitosis was introduced by
(a) Watson and Crick
(b) Beadle and Tatum
(c) Farmer and Moore
(d) Fleming

Answer 1

Hint: He was a German biologist and also the founder of cytogenetics and worked extensively in the investigations related to the process of cell division and chromosome distribution in the cells.
Complete answer:
Mitosis is a type of cell division that results in two daughter cells each having the same number and kind of chromosomes as that of the parent nucleus. Walther Flemming coined the term mitosis in 1882 when he discovered that the chromosomes during the cell division split longitudinally to distribute themselves equally between two daughter cells.
Walther Flemming was a German biologist. He was born in Sachsenberg, Germany, on 21 April 1843. He was the fifth child and the only son of the psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Flemming. Flemming trained in medicine at The University of Prague and graduated in 1868. He served for 1 year as a military physician in the Franco-Prussian War. From the year 1873 to 1876 he worked as a teacher at the University of Prague. In 1876, he accepted the post of a professor of anatomy at the University of Kiel. He also became the director of the Anatomical Institute.
He studied mitosis in vivo as well as in stained preparations, using as the source of biological material, the fins, and gills of salamanders. His results were published first in 1878 and 1882 in the seminal book Zellsubstanz, Kern und Zelltheilung. He died on 4 August 1905.
So, the correct answer is, ‘Fleming.’

Note: Based on his discoveries related to mitosis, Flemming summarized for the first time that all cell nuclei came from another predecessor nucleus (he coined the phrase ‘Omnis Nucleus e Nucleo’, after Virchow's ‘Omnis cellula e cellula’). His discoveries in the field of cell biology are listed in the top 10 discoveries in this field.