Roux was born and educated in Jena, German Confederation where he attended university and studied under Ernst Haeckel.

He also attended university in Berlin and Strasbourg and studied under Gustav Albert Schwalbe, Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen, and Rudolf Virchow.

He was professor at Innsbruck, Austria from 1889 to 1895, then accepted a professorial chair at the Anatomical Institute of the University of Halle, a post he retained until 1921.

In 1885 Roux removed a section of the medullary plate of an embryonic chicken and tamed it in a warm saline solution for 13 days, establishing the principle of tissue culture[1] which would later be taken up by Ross Granville Harrison and Paul Alfred Weiss.

Despite this early lapse into a fallacy of reductionism, Roux's pioneering mechanical methodology was to prove most fruitful in 20th century biology.