Dr. Mary Sunderland
Dr. Mary Sunderland served as graduate student coordinator for the first three years of the Embryo Project, working on articles, helping to design the database, and serving as the connection between the project team and the library. She received a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto carrying out stem cell research, then wrote her dissertation on the history of regeneration studies.
Mary received her Ph.D. from our Biology and Society Program in December 2008, and she now has an exciting position as postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She is putting her research and management expertise from the Embryo Project to work there. Congratulations Mary!
Technology
The Embryo Project is committed to open standards and thus makes use of open-source technologies to store, manage, and disseminate its digital content — encyclopedic entries and scholarly interpretive essays, digital images, timeline visualizations, and videos. The Project is part of a large and growing community of educational, research, and government institutions that utilize the Fedora repository system.
In conjunction with the ASU Library, the MBL, and the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Embryo Project is developing not only a repository of digital objects centered around embryo research, but also new solutions to bridging the divide between traditional scholarship in the humanities and the explosion of information in the digital world.
Bonner and Morphogenesis
John Tyler Bonner spent his entire career at Princeton with frequent stays at the MBL, where he wrote his book Morphogenesis: An Essay on Development in the office of embryologist Edwin Grant Conklin. Bonner’s reflections on developmental biology, building on his study of the life cycles of slime molds, provides insights into many of the twentieth century’s major themes.
Furthermore, morphogenesis continues to be an important aspect of our understanding of development at large, combining physiological with biomechanical and biochemical considerations.