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"Experiments in Plant Hybridization" (1866), by Johann Gregor Mendel
During the mid-nineteenth century, Johann Gregor Mendel experimented with pea plants to develop a theory of inheritance. In 1843, while a monk in the Augustian St Thomas's Abbey in Brünn, Austria, now Brno, Czech Repubic, Mendel examined the physical appearance of the abbey's pea plants (Pisum sativum) and noted inconsistencies between what he saw and what the blending theory of inheritance, a primary model of inheritance at the time, predicted.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
"The Inductive Capacity of Oral Mesenchyme and Its Role in Tooth Development" (1969-1970), by Edward J. Kollar and Grace R. Baird
Between February 1969 and August 1970 Edward Kollar and Grace Baird, from the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, published three papers that established the role of the mesenchyme in tooth induction. Drawing upon a history of using tissue interactions to understand differentiation, Kollar and Baird designed their experiments to understand how differentiated structures become specified. Their work overturned a widely accepted model that epithelium controls the identity of the structure, a phenomenon called structural specificity.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
“Effect of Vaginal Sildenafil on the Outcome of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) After Multiple IVF Failures Attributed to Poor Endometrial Development” (2002), by Geoffrey Sher and Jeffrey Fisch
Researchers Geoffrey Sher and Jeffrey Fisch gave Viagra, also known as sildenafil, to women undergoing fertility treatment to test whether the medication could improve fertility and pregnancy rates. The researchers proposed that Viagra, typically indicated to treat erectile dysfunction in men, would help women with a history of failed past fertility treatments by thickening their endometrial lining, which is the layer of tissue in the uterus where an embryo implants during pregnancy.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, Reproduction, Disorders
Amphioxus, and the Mosaic Theory of Development (1893), by Edmund Beecher Wilson
Edmund Beecher Wilson experimented with Amphioxus (Branchiostoma) embryos in 1892 to identify what caused their cells to differentiate into new types of cells during the process of development. Wilson shook apart the cells at early stages of embryonic development, and he observed the development of the isolated cells. He observed that in the normal development of Amphioxus, all three main types of symmetry, or cleavage patterns observed in embryos, could be found. Wilson proposed a hypothesis that reformed the Mosaic Theory associated with Wilhelm Roux in Germany.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
Calvin Bridges’ Experiments on Nondisjunction as Evidence for the Chromosome Theory of Heredity (1913-1916)
From 1913 to 1916, Calvin Bridges performed experiments that indicated genes are found on chromosomes. His experiments were a part of his doctoral thesis advised by Thomas Hunt Morgan in New York, New York. In his experiments, Bridges studied Drosophila, the common fruit fly, and by doing so showed that a process called nondisjunction caused chromosomes, under some circumstances, to fail to separate when forming sperm and egg cells. Nondisjunction, as described by Bridges, caused sperm or egg cells to contain abnormal amounts of chromosomes.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, Publications
"The Development of the Turtle Carapace" (1989), by Ann Campbell Burke
Ann Campbell Burke examines the development and evolution of vertebrates, in particular, turtles. Her Harvard University experiments, described in Development of the Turtle Carapace: Implications for the Evolution of a Novel Bauplan, were published in 1989. Burke used molecular techniques to investigate the developmental mechanisms responsible for the formation of the turtle shell.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, Publications
David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel’s Research on Optical Development in Kittens
During 1964, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel studied the short and long term effects of depriving kittens of vision in one eye. In their experiments, Wiesel and Hubel used kittens as models for human children. Hubel and Wiesel researched whether the impairment of vision in one eye could be repaired or not and whether such impairments would impact vision later on in life. The researchers sewed one eye of a kitten shut for varying periods of time.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
Experimental Studies on Germinal Localization (1904), by Edmund B. Wilson
At the turn of the twentieth century, Edmund B. Wilson
performed experiments to show where germinal
matter was located in molluscs. At Columbia University in New York City,
New York, Wilson studied what causes cells to differentiate during
development. In 1904 he conducted his experiments on molluscs, and he modified the
theory about the location of germinal matter in the succeeding years. Wilson and others modified the
theory of germinal localization to accommodate results that showed
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
Paul Kammerer (1880-1926)
Paul Kammerer conducted experiments on amphibians and marine animals at the Vivarium, a research institute in Vienna, Austria, in the early twentieth century. Kammerer bred organisms in captivity, and he induced them to develop particular adaptations, which Kammerer claimed the organismss offspring would inherit. Kammerer argued that his results demonstrated the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or Lamarckian inheritance. The Lamarckian theory of inheritance posits that individuals transmit acquired traits to their offspring.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, People
Barbara McClintock's Transposon Experiments in Maize (1931–1951)
Barbara McClintock conducted experiments on corn (Zea mays) in the United States in the mid-twentieth century to study the structure and function of the chromosomes in the cells. McClintock researched how genes combined in corn and proposed mechanisms for how those interactions are regulated. McClintock received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983, the first woman to win the prize without sharing it. McClintock won the award for her introduction of the concept of transposons, also called jumping genes.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
"A Series of Normal Stages in the Development of the Chick Embryo" (1951), by Viktor Hamburger and Howard L. Hamilton
The developmental stages of the chick embryo were examined by Viktor Hamburger and Howard L. Hamilton in "A Series of Normal Stages in the Development of the Chick Embryo," published in the Journal of Morphology in 1951. These stages were published to standardize the development of the chick based on varying laboratory conditions and genetic differences. The stages Hamburger and Hamilton assigned were determined by the visible features of the chick embryo.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
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
Hox Genes and the Evolution of Vertebrate Axial Morphology Experiment (1995)
In 1995, researchers Ann Burke, Craig Nelson, Bruce Morgan, and Cliff Tabin in the US studied the genes that regulate the construction of vertebra in developing chick and mouse embryos, they showed similar patterns of gene regulation across both species, and they concluded that those patterns were inherited from an ancestor common to all vertebrate animals. The group analyzed the head-to-tail (anterior-posterior) axial development of vertebrates, as the anterior-posterior axis showed variation between species over the course of evolutionary time.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
"Maternal Thyroid Deficiency During Pregnancy and Subsequent Neuropsychological Development of the Child" (1999), by James E. Haddow et al.
From 1987 to the late 1990s, James Haddow and his team of researchers at the Foundation for Blood Research in Scarborough, Maine, studied children born to women who had thyroid deficiencies while pregnant with those children. Haddow's team focused the study on newborns who had normal thyroid function at the time of neonatal screening. They tested the intelligence quotient, or IQ, of the children, ages eight to eleven years, and found that all of the children born to thyroid-hormone deficient mothers performed less well than the control group.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
"The linear arrangement of six sex-linked factors in drosophila, as shown by their mode of association” (1913), by Alfred Henry Sturtevant
In 1913, Alfred Henry Sturtevant published the results of experiments in which he showed how genes are arranged along a chromosome. Sturtevant performed those experiments as an undergraduate at Columbia University, in New York, New York, under the guidance of Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan. Sturtevant studied heredity using Drosophila, the common fruit fly. In his experiments, Sturtevant determined the relative positions of six genetic factors on a fly’s chromosome by creating a process called gene mapping.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, Publications
Roger Sperry’s Split Brain Experiments (1959–1968)
In the 1950s and 1960s, Roger Sperry performed experiments on cats, monkeys, and humans to study functional differences between the two hemispheres of the brain in the United States. To do so he studied the corpus callosum, which is a large bundle of neurons that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Sperry severed the corpus callosum in cats and monkeys to study the function of each side of the brain. He found that if hemispheres were not connected, they functioned independently of one another, which he called a split-brain.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
“Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophila” (1910), by Thomas Hunt Morgan
In 1910, Thomas Hunt Morgan performed an experiment at Columbia University, in New York City, New York, that helped identify the role chromosomes play in heredity. That year, Morgan was breeding Drosophila, or fruit flies. After observing thousands of fruit fly offspring with red eyes, he obtained one that had white eyes. Morgan began breeding the white-eyed mutant fly and found that in one generation of flies, the trait was only present in males.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments, Publications
"The Development of the Pronephros during the Embryonic and Early Larval Life of the Catfish (Ictalurus punctatus)" (1932), by Rachel L. Carson
Rachel L. Carson studied biology at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and graduated in 1933 with an MA upon the completion of her thesis, The Development of the Pronephros during the Embryonic and Early Larval Life of the Catfish (Ictalurus punctatus). The research that Carson conducted for this thesis project grounded many of the claims and observations she presented in her 1962 book, Silent Spring.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Experiments, Publications
The Meselson-Stahl Experiment (1957–1958), by Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl
In an experiment later named for them, Matthew Stanley Meselson and Franklin William Stahl in the US demonstrated during the 1950s the semi-conservative replication of DNA, such that each daughter DNA molecule contains one new daughter subunit and one subunit conserved from the parental DNA molecule. The researchers conducted the experiment at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, from October 1957 to January 1958.
Format: Articles
Subject: Processes, Experiments
"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
Beadle and Ephrussi Show that Something Besides Eye Tissue Determines Eye Color in Fruit Flies
In the 1930s, George Beadle and Boris Ephrussi discovered factors that affect eye colors in developing fruit flies. They did so while working at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. (1) They took optic discs (colored fuchsia in the image) from fruit fly larvae in the third instar stage of development. Had the flies not been manipulated, they would have developed into adults with vermilion eyes.
Format: Graphics
Subject: Experiments, Organisms
Beadle and Ephrussi’s Technique to Transplant Optic Discs between Fruit Fly Larvae
In 1935, George Beadle and Boris Ephrussi developed a technique to transplant optic discs between fruit fly larvae. They developed it while at the California Institute of Technology in Pasedena, California. Optic discs are tissues from which the adult eyes develop. Beadle and Ephrussi used their technique to study the development of the eye and eye pigment. (1) The experimenter dissects a donor larva, which is in the third instar stage of development, and removes the optic disc (colored red) with a micropipette.
Format: Graphics
Subject: Technologies, Experiments, Organisms
Paul Kammerer's Experiments on the Midwife Toad (1905-1910)
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Paul Kammerer, a zoologist working at the Vivarium in Vienna, Austria, conducted research on developmental mechanisms, including a series of breeding experiments on toads (Alytes obstetricans). Kammerer claimed that his results demonstrated that organisms could transmit acquired characteristics to their offspring.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
Stanley Alan Plotkin's Development of a Rubella Vaccine (1969)
In the US during the late 1960s, Stanley Alan Plotkin, John D. Farquhar, Michael Katz, and Fritz Buser isolated a strain of the infectious disease rubella and developed a rubella vaccine with a weakened, or attenuated, version of the virus strain. Rubella, also called German measles, is a highly contagious disease caused by the rubella virus that generally causes mild rashes and fever. However, in pregnant women, rubella infections can lead to developmental defects in their fetuses.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
Viktor Hamburger's Study of Central-Peripheral Relations in the Development of Nervous System
An important question throughout the history of embryology is whether the formation of a biological structure is predetermined or shaped by its environment. If both intrinsic and environmental controls occur, how exactly do the two processes coordinate in crafting specific forms and functions? When Viktor Hamburger started his PhD study in embryology in the 1920s, few neuroembryologists were investigating how the central neurons innervate peripheral organs.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments