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Gunther von Hagens' Plastination Technique
Plastination is a technique for preserving tissues, organs, and whole bodies for medical purposes and public display. Gunther von Hagens invented a form of the method in 1977 at Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, Germany after observing medical students struggle working with cadavers that quickly decomposed. Von Hagens' body models, referred to as plastinates, have since become widely used educational tools not only for those studying anatomy and medicine, but also for the general public.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies
Hilde Mangold (1898-1924)
Hilde Mangold, previously Hilde Proescholdt, was a German embryologist and physiologist who became well known for research completed with Hans Spemann in the 1920s. As a graduate student, Mangold assisted Spemann and together they discovered and coined the term the "organizer." The organizer discovery was a crucial contribution to embryology that led to further understanding of the pattern of embryo differentiation of amphibians.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
St. George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900)
St. George Jackson Mivart studied animals and worked in England during the nineteenth century. He also proposed a theory of organismal development that he called individuation, and he critiqued Charles Darwin's argument for evolution by natural selection. His work on prosimians, a group of primates excluding apes and monkeys, helped scientists better investigate the Primate group.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Paul Kammerer's Experiments on Salamanders (1903-1912)
In the early twentieth century, Paul Kammerer conducted a series of experiments to demonstrate that organisms could transmit characteristics acquired in their lifetimes to their offspring. In his 1809 publication, zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had hypothesized that living beings can inherit features their parents or ancestors acquired throughout life. By breeding salamanders, as well as frogs and other organisms, Kammerer tested Lamarck's hypothesis in an attempt to provide evidence for Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
Paul Kammerer's Experiments on Sea-squirts in the Early Twentieth Century
In the early twentieth century, Paul Kammerer, a zoologist working at the Vivarium in Vienna, Austria, experimented on sea-squirts (Ciona intestinalis). Kammerer claimed that results from his experiments demonstrated that organisms could transmit characteristics that they had acquired in their lifetimes to their offspring. Kammerer conducted breeding experiments on sea-squirts and other organisms at a time when Charles Darwin's 1859 theory of evolution lacked evidence to explain how offspring inherited traits from their parents.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, Organisms
The Y-Chromosome in Animals
The Y-chromosome is one of a pair of chromosomes that determine the genetic sex of individuals in mammals, some insects, and some plants. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the development of new microscopic and molecular techniques, including DNA sequencing, enabled scientists to confirm the hypothesis that chromosomes determine the sex of developing organisms. In an adult organism, the genes on the Y-chromosome help produce the male gamete, the sperm cell. Beginning in the 1980s, many studies of human populations used the Y-chromosome gene sequences to trace paternal lineages.
Format: Articles
Subject: Reproduction, Theories
Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954)
Alan Mathison Turing was a British mathematician and computer scientist who lived in the early twentieth century. Among important contributions in the field of mathematics, computer science, and philosophy, he developed a mathematical model of morphogenesis. This model describing biological growth became fundamental for research on the process of embryo development.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
William Keith Brooks (1848-1908)
Biologist William Keith Brooks studied embryological development in invertebrates and used his results as evidence for theories of evolution and ancestral heredity. He founded a marine biological laboratory where his and others' embryological studies took place. Later in life, Brooks became head of the Biology Department at Johns Hopkins University where he helped shape the minds of leading embryologists.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
The Meckel-Serres Conception of Recapitulation
Johann Friedrich Meckel and Antoine Etienne Reynaud Augustin Serres developed in the early 1800s the basic principles of what later became called the Meckel-Serres Law. Meckel and Serres both argued that fetal deformities result when development prematurely stops, and they argued that these arrests characterized lower life forms, through which higher order organisms progress during normal development. The concept that the embryos of higher order organisms progress through successive stages in which they resemble lower level forms is called recapitulation.
Format: Articles
Subject: Theories
Leo Kanner (1894-1981)
Leo Kanner studied and described early infantile autism in humans in the US during the twentieth century. Though Eugen Bleuler first coined the term autism in 1910 as a symptom of schizophrenia, Kanner helped define autism as a disease concept separate from schizophrenia. He helped found an early child psychiatry department in 1930 at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
"Transfer of Fetal Cells with Multilineage Potential to Maternal Tissue" (2004), by Kiarash Khosrotehrani et al.
In 2004, a team of researchers at Tufts-New England
Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, investigated the fetal
cells that remained in the maternal blood stream after pregnancy.
The results were published in Transfer of Fetal Cells with
Multilineage Potential to Maternal Tissue. The team working on that
research included Kiarash Khosrotehrani, Kirby L. Johnson, Dong
Hyun Cha, Robert N. Salomon, and Diana W. Bianchi. The researchers
reported that the fetal cells passed to a pregnant woman during
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, Reproduction
Abortion
Abortion is the removal of the embryo or fetus from the womb, before birth can occur-either naturally or by induced labor. Prenatal development occurs in three stages: the zygote, or fertilized egg; the embryo, from post-conception to eight weeks; and the fetus, from eight weeks after conception until the baby is born. After abortion, the infant does not and cannot live. Spontaneous abortion is the loss of the infant naturally or accidentally, without the will of the mother. It is more commonly referred to as miscarriage.
Format: Articles
Subject: Processes, Ethics, Reproduction
Menstrual Tampon
Menstrual tampons are feminine hygiene devices, usually made of absorbent cotton, that are temporarily inserted into the vagina for absorbing a woman’s blood during menstruation. In 1931, Earl Haas invented the menstrual tampon most commonly used in the twenty-first century. Later, Gertrude Tendrich produced the first commercial tampon brand, Tampax, using Haas’s patented design. Tendrich and Haas’s tampon was made of tightly compacted absorbent cotton, shaped like a bullet, and had a string attached at the base that allowed for easy removal from the woman’s body.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies
Phalloplasty
Phalloplasty is a type of surgery that takes existing skin, tissue, and nerves from surrounding areas on a patient’s body to repair or form a neophallus, or a new penis structure. In 1946, Harold Gillies, a plastic surgeon who practiced in England, performed one of the first modern phalloplasties that entailed creating an entire neophallus for a transsexual, called transgender as of 2022, man in London, England. The reconstructive need for phalloplasties started as a result of treating blast wounds during World War I and World War II.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies, Reproduction
Julia Barlow Platt (1857-1935)
Julia Barlow Platt studied neural crests in animal embryos and became involved in politics in the US during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She researched how body and head segments formed in chicks (Gallus gallus) and spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias). Platt observed that in the mudpuppy (Necturus maculosus), the coordinated migration of neural crest cells in the embryo produced parts of the nervous system, bones, and connective tissues in the head.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Mitochondria
All cells that have a nucleus, including plant, animal, fungal cells, and most single-celled protists, also have mitochondria. Mitochondria are particles called organelles found outside the nucleus in a cell's cytoplasm. The main function of mitochondria is to supply energy to the cell, and therefore to the organism. The theory for how mitochondria evolved, proposed by Lynn Margulis in the twentieth century, is that they were once free-living organisms.
Format: Articles
Clinical Tests of Estrogen Injections on Women with Abnormal Menstrual Cycles During the Early 1920s by Jean Paul Pratt and Edgar Allen
In the early twentieth century US, Jean Paul Pratt and Edgar Allen conducted clinical experiments on women who had abnormal menstrual cycles. During the clinical tests, researchers injected the hormone estrogen into their patients to alleviate their menstrual ailments, which ranged from irregular cycles to natural menopause. The hormone estrogen plays a prominent role in the menstrual cycle by signaling the tissue lining the uterus (endometrium) to thicken in preparation for possible pregnancy.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
Alexandre Lion’s Incubator Charities in Europe (1894–1898)
Alexandre Lion established incubator charities in the late 1890s in France to promote his infant incubator. Lion’s infant incubators kept premature infants warm and improved their chances of survival, but were expensive and not widely used. In order to promote his new technology, Lion displayed incubators that carried premature infants in storefronts and at fairs and expositions throughout Europe. After the public began paying admission to view the infants and incubators, the expositions became incubator charities. Admission fees went directly to the care of the premature infants.
Format: Articles
Subject: Organizations
Role of Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) in Alcohol-Induced Craniofacial Abnormalities
Prenatal exposure to alcohol (ethanol) results in a continuum of physical and neurological developmental abnormalities that vary depending on the timing, duration, and degree of alcohol exposure. Heavy exposure during development may lead to the condition Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), characterized by growth deficits, neurological deficiencies and minor facial abnormalities. Alcohol is a known teratogen, an agent that causes birth defects and acts upon developing embryos through mechanisms that are not yet fully understood.
Format: Articles
Subject: Disorders
Plan B: Emergency Contraceptive Pill
Plan B is a progestin-only emergency contraceptive pill (ECP) that can be taken within seventy-two hours of unprotected sex in order to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Plan B was created in response to the United States Food and Drug Administration's (US FDA) 1997 request for new drug applications (NDAs) for a dedicated ECP product, and was approved for sales in the US in 1999. Duramed, a subsidiary of Barr Pharmaceuticals, manufactures Plan B for The Women's Capital Corporation (WCC), which owns the patent for Plan B.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies, Reproduction
Reassessment of Carrel's Immortal Tissue Culture Experiments
In the 1910s, Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon and biologist, concluded that cells are intrinsically immortal. His claim was based on chick-heart tissue cultures in his laboratory that seemed to be able to proliferate forever. Carrel's ideas about cellular immortality convinced his many contemporaries that cells could be maintained indefinitely. In the 1960s, however, Carrel's thesis about cell immortality was put into question by the discovery that human diploid cells can only proliferate for a finite period.
Format: Articles
Wilhelm His, Sr. (1831-1904)
Wilhelm His, Sr. was born on 9 July 1831 in Basel, Switzerland, to Katharina La Roche and Eduard His. He began his medical studies at Basel in 1849 and later transferred to the University of Bern during the winter semester of 1849-1850. A year later, His arrived at the University of Berlin, where he studied under Johannes Müller and Robert Remak. For his clinical training, His attended the University of Würzburg from 1852-1853.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Making Visible Embryos (2008- ), by Tatjana Buklijaz and Nick Hopwood
Making Visible Embryos is a 2008 online exhibition of embryos authored and designed by Tatjana Buklijaz and Nick Hopwood who work in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Hopwood's research on the history of Ziegler wax models and the use of visual aids to promote the teaching and learning of science is well known.
Format: Articles
Subject: Organizations, Outreach
Kurt Benirschke (1924-)
Kurt Benirschke studied cells, placentas, and endangered species in Germany and the US during the twentieth century. Benirschke was professor at the University of California in San Diego, California, and a director of the research department at the San Diego Zoo in San Diego, California. He also helped form the research department of the San Diego Zoo and its sister organization, the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
ABO Blood Type Identification and Forensic Science (1900-1960)
The use of blood in forensic analysis is a method for identifying individuals suspected of committing some kinds of crimes. Paul Uhlenhuth and Karl Landsteiner, two scientists working separately in Germany in the early twentieth century, showed that there are differences in blood between individuals. Uhlenhuth developed a technique to identify the existence of antibodies, and Landsteiner and his students showed that humans had distinctly different blood types called A, B, AB, and O.
Format: Articles
Subject: Theories, Legal, Technologies