Akademik

Wolff·ian body .wu̇l-fē-ən- n MESONEPHROS

Wolff 'vȯlf Caspar Friedrich (1734-1794)

German anatomist and embryologist. Wolff spent most of his career as a lecturer on anatomy at the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg, Russia. His primary achievement was his refutation of the theory of preformation, the theory which held that the development of an organism was simply the expansion of a fully formed embryo. In his studies of the chick embryo he followed the development of the mesonephros and discovered the embryonic kidneys that become the final metanephros and are now known as Wolffian bodies.

see mesonephros