Search

Displaying 1 - 25 of 237 items.

Pages

“The Science and Ethics of Making Part-Human Animals in Stem Cell Biology” (2006), by Jason Scott Robert

In 2006, bioethicist Jason Scott Robert published “The Science and Ethics of Making Part-Human Animals in Stem Cell Biology” in The FASEB Journal. There, he reviews the scientific and ethical justifications and restrictions on creating part-human animals. Robert describes part-human animals, otherwise known as chimeras, as those resulting from the intentional combination of human and nonhuman cells, tissues, or organs at any stage of development.

Format: Articles

Subject: Ethics, Publications, Organisms

“Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate” (1953), by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling

In April 1953, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, published “Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate,” in the scientific journal Nature. The article contained Franklin and Gosling’s analysis of their X-ray diffraction pattern of thymonucleate or deoxyribonucleic acid, known as DNA. In the early 1950s, scientists confirmed that genes, the heritable factors that control how organisms develop, contained DNA. However, at the time scientists had not determined how DNA functioned or its three-dimensional structure.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

“Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” (1953), by James Watson and Francis Crick

In April 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure of Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” or “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” in the journal Nature. In the article, Watson and Crick propose a novel structure for deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. In 1944, Oswald T. Avery and his group at Rockefeller University in New York City, New York published experimental evidence that DNA contained genes, the biological factors called genes that dictate how organisms grow and develop.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

Meselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA: A History of "The Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology" (2001), by Frederic Lawrence Holmes

In 2001, Yale University Press published Frederic Lawrence Holmes' book, Meselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA: A History of "The Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology" (Replication of DNA), which chronicles the 1950s debate about how DNA replicates. That experiment verified that DNA replicates semi-conservatively as originally proposed by Watson and Crick. Rather than focusing solely on experiments and findings, Holmes's book presents the investigative processes of scientists studying DNA replication.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

Thesis: Reproduction in Science Fiction

Science fiction works can reflect the relationship between science and society by telling stories that are set in the future of ethical implications or social consequences of scientific advancements. This thesis investigates how the concept of reproduction is depicted in popular science fiction works.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Publications, Reproduction

Chapter One and Chapter Two from “Program of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development” (1994), by United Nations Population Fund

“Program of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development” comprises the majority of context within the twenty-year sustainable development plan, International Conference on Population and Development Program of Action, hereafter POA, published in 1994 by the United Nations Population Fund or UNFPA. Given the rising global population, the goal of the POA was to outline the steps governments around the world were to take to achieve sustainable development by 2014.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications, Outreach

Thesis: From Fertilization to Birth: Representing Development in High School Biology Textbooks

Biology textbooks are everybody's business. In accepting the view that texts are created with specific social goals in mind, I examined 127 twentieth-century high school biology textbooks for representations of animal development. Paragraphs and visual representations were coded and placed in one of four scientific literacy categories, including descriptive, investigative, nature of science, and HETS, or human embryos, technology, and society. I then interpreted how embryos and fetuses have been socially constructed for students.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Publications

"Veterans and Agent Orange Update 1996: Summary and Research Highlights" by the US National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine

In March 1996, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States released 'Veterans and Agent Orange Update 1996: Summary and Research Highlights,' which summarized research on the health effects of Agent Orange and other herbicides used in the Vietnam War. In their 1996 report, the National Academy connects Agent Orange exposure with two health conditions: spina bifida, a birth defect that occurs when the spinal cord develops improperly, and peripheral neuropathy, a nervous system condition in which the peripheral nerves are damaged.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

“Reproductive Injustice: Racial and Gender Discrimination in U.S. Healthcare” (2014), by the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective

In 2014, the Center for Reproductive Rights, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health released a co-authored report titled “Reproductive Injustice: Racial and Gender Discrimination in U.S. Healthcare,” hereafter “Reproductive Injustice.” In “Reproductive Injustice,” the organizations evaluate trends in the US federal system concerning racial and gender discrimination in sexual and reproductive healthcare.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications, Organizations, Outreach, Legal

Dissertation: Lessons from Embryos: Haeckel’s Embryo Drawings, Evolution, and Secondary Biology Textbooks

Haeckel believed that the development of an embryo revealed the adult stages of the organism’s ancestors. Haeckel represented this idea with drawings of vertebrate embryos at similar developmental stages. This is Haeckel’s embryo grid, the most common of all illustrations in biology textbooks. Yet, Haeckel’s embryo grids are much more complex than any textbook explanation. I examined 240 high school biology textbooks, from 1907 to 2010, for embryo grids.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Publications, People

“A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids” (1953) by Linus Pauling and Robert Brainard Corey

In February 1953, Linus Pauling and Robert Brainard Corey, two scientists working at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, proposed a structure for deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in their article “A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids,” henceforth “Nucleic Acids.” In the article, Pauling and Corey suggest a model for nucleic acids, including DNA, that consisted of three nucleic acid strands wound together in a triple helix.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

Photograph 51, by Rosalind Franklin (1952)

On 6 May 1952, at King’s College London in London, England, Rosalind Franklin photographed her fifty-first X-ray diffraction pattern of deoxyribosenucleic acid, or DNA. Photograph 51, or Photo 51, revealed information about DNA’s three-dimensional structure by displaying the way a beam of X-rays scattered off a pure fiber of DNA. Franklin took Photo 51 after scientists confirmed that DNA contained genes. Maurice Wilkins, Franklin’s colleague showed James and Francis Crick Photo 51 without Franklin’s knowledge. Watson and Crick used that image to develop their structural model of DNA.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

"The Origin and Behavior of Mutable Loci in Maize" (1950), by Barbara McClintock

The Origin and Behavior of Mutable Loci in Maize, by Barbara McClintock, was published in 1950 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. McClintock worked at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, New York, at the time of the publication, and describes her discovery of transposable elements in the genome of corn (Zea mays). Transposable elements, sometimes called transposons or jumping genes, are pieces of the chromosome capable of physically changing positions along the chromosome.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

"On the Replication of Desoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA)" (1954), by Max Delbruck

In 1954 Max Delbruck published On the Replication of Desoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) to question the semi-conservative DNA replication mechanism proposed that James Watson and Francis Crick had proposed in 1953. In his article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Delbrück offers an alternative DNA replication mechanism, later called dispersive replication. Unlike other articles before it, On the Replication presents ways to experimentally test different DNA replication theories.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

"Behavioral Thermoregulation by Turtle Embryos" (2011), by Wei-Guo Du, Bo Zhao, Ye Chen, and Richard Shine

In "Behavioral Thermoregulation by Turtle Embryos," published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April, 2011, Wei-Guo Du, Bo Zhao, Ye Chen, and Richard Shine report that turtle embryos can move towards warmer temperatures within the egg when presented with a small, 0.8 degrees Celsius gradient. This behavioral thermoregulation may benefit the embryo's fitness by accelerating the rate of development enough to decrease the incubation period by up to four and a half days. Embryos are generally thought to have little control over their surroundings.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

Thesis: How Purported Scientific Failures Have Led to Advancements in IVF

This thesis shows us the history of how some of the first attempts at IVF in humans using various options such as donated egg cells and cryopreserved embryos, often ended in early miscarriages. At that time, most members of the scientific community and general public responded to those trials by regarding them as insignificant. In 1998, the success rate of women under the age of 38 having children with the use of IVF was 22.1%. Over time, scientists began to acknowledge those published findings that detailed various “failed” human IVF experiments.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Publications, Technologies, Experiments, Reproduction, Outreach

Essay: Review of Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos

To Lynn M. Morgan, the Mary E. Woolley Professor of Anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, nothing says life more than a dead embryo. In her easily readable book, Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos, Morgan brings together cultural phenomena, ethics, and embryology to show that even dead embryos and fetuses have their own stories to tell. As an anthropologist, Morgan is interested in many things, including the science of embryology and its history. But she also wants to know how culture influences our views on embryos and the material practices that accompany their study.

Format: Essays and Theses

Subject: Publications

"A Genomic Regulatory Network for Development" (2002), by Eric H. Davidson, et al.

In 2002 Eric Davidson and his research team published 'A Genomic Regulatory Network for Development' in Science. The authors present the first experimental verification and systemic description of a gene regulatory network. This publication represents the culmination of greater than thirty years of work on gene regulation that began in 1969 with 'A Gene Regulatory Network for Development: A Theory' by Roy Britten and Davidson. The modeling of a large number of interactions in a gene network had not been achieved before.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

"Embryonic Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Blastocytes" (1998), by James Thomson

After becoming chief pathologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Wisconsin Regional Primate Center in 1995, James A. Thomson began his pioneering work in deriving embryonic stem cells from isolated embryos. That same year, Thomson published his first paper, "Isolation of a Primate Embryonic Stem Cell Line," in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, detailing the first derivation of primate embryonic stem cells. In the following years, Thomson and his team of scientists - Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor, Sander S. Shapiro, Michelle A.

Format: Articles

Subject: Experiments, Publications

"National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference Statement September 22–24, 1980” (1980), by the National Institutes of Health

In 1980 the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) released a report titled, “National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference Statement September 22–24, 1980.” The report lists recommendations for birth delivery through cesarean sections, a surgical procedure used to deliver the fetus via the pregnant woman’s abdomen. The recommendations arose from the 1980 Consensus Development Conference on Cesarean Childbirth in Bethesda, Maryland.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

The Biological Bulletin

From 1886 to 1889 Charles Otis Whitman was director of the Allis Lake Laboratory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The lab was established by Edward Phelps Allis, Jr. to provide a place for biological research separate from a university setting and a place where an independent scholar like Allis himself could work. Allis had hired Whitman as an instructor to establish the lab, direct it, and lead a research program there. The lab lasted for eight years, attracted several researchers, and the papers that came out of the lab included a focus on embryology.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

The Diversity of Animals: An Evolutionary Study (1962), by Edward Stuart Russell

In 1962 the journal Acta Biotheoretica published the final work of the biologist Edward Stuart Russell, a full eight years after his death. Entitled The Diversity of Animals: an Evolutionary Study, this short, unfinished manuscript on evolution received little recognition in the scientific presses despite both its technical discussion of adaptations in decapods (crabs, shrimp, etc.) and its different approach to evolutionary theory. The precise reason for this neglect is unclear.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

An Atlas of Fertilization and Karyokinesis of the Ovum (1895), by Edmund Beecher Wilson

Edmund Beecher Wilson in the US published An Atlas of Fertilization and Karyokinesis of the Ovum (hereafter called An Atlas) in 1895. The book presents photographs by photographer Edward Leaming that capture stages of fertilization, the fusion of sperm and egg and early development of sea urchin (Toxopneustes variegatus) ova, or egg cell. Prior to An Atlas, no one photographed of eggcell division in clear detail. Wilson obtained high quality images of egg cells by cutting the cells into thin sections and preserving them throughout different stages of development.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications, Reproduction

Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), by Stephen Jay Gould

Ontogeny and Phylogeny is a book published in 1977, in which the author Stephen J. Gould, who worked in the US, tells a history of the theory of recapitulation. A theory of recapitulation aims to explain the relationship between the embryonic development of an organism (ontogeny) and the evolution of that organism's species (phylogeny). Although there are several variations of recapitulationist theories, most claim that during embryonic development an organism repeats the adult stages of organisms from those species in it's evolutionary history.

Format: Articles

Subject: Publications

Pages