Carl Christoph Vogt (July 5, 1817 in Gießen, Germany – May 5, 1895 in Geneva, Switzerland) was a German scientist who emigrated to Switzerland. Vogt published a number of notable works on zoology, geology and physiology. All his life he was engaged in politics, in the German Frankfurt Parliament of 1848-9 and later in Switzerland.

During his time with Louis Agassiz in Neuchâtel he discovered--in 1842--the mechanism of apoptosis, the programmed cell death, in studying the development of the tadpole of the midwife toad (Alytes obstetricians). Charles Darwin mentions Vogt's support for the theory of evolution in the introduction to his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).

Contents 1 Politics 2 References 3 Sources 4 External links

[edit] Politics

Vogt was active in German politics and was a left-wing representative in the Frankfurt Parliament. Karl Marx scathingly replied to slanderous attacks by Karl Vogt in his book Herr Vogt (1860).

Marx's defenders pointed to the fact that, years later (1871), records published after the fall of the Second Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte III indicated that Vogt had been secretly in the pay of the French Emperor.

[edit] References

• Untersuchungen über die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Geburtshelferkröte. (Alytes obstetricians), Solothurn: Jent und Gassman, (1842), pp 130

[edit] Sources

• Fredrick Gregory: Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany, Springer, Berlin u.a. 1977, ISBN 902770760X

[edit] External links

• Short biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
• http://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/ch10b.htm