Born as Rudolf Albert von Kölliker, the son of a banker in Zurich, Switzerland, Kölliker attended the Zurich Gymnasium and showed an early interest in botany. As a medical student at the University of Zurich from 1836 to 1839, he studied zoology under Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), anatomy under Friedrich Arnold (1803-1890), and botany under Oswald Heer (1809-1883). Both at the gymnasium and in Oken's classes, the future botanist Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817-1891) was his schoolmate.

After one semester at the University of Bonn, Germany, Kölliker spent three semesters at the University of Berlin, studying comparative anatomy and physiology under Johannes Müller (1801-1858), microscopic anatomy under Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle (1809-1885), and embryology under Robert Remak (1815-1865). While studying marine invertebrates on the North Sea coast during the winter of 1840-1841, he discovered that spermatozoa arise from cells specifically equipped...