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Images of Embryos in Life Magazine in the 1950s
Embryonic images displayed in Life magazine during the mid-twentieth century serve as a representation of technological advances and the growing public interest in the stages of embryological development. These black-and-white photographs portray skeletal structures and intact bodies of chicken embryos and human embryos and fetuses obtained from collections belonging to universities and medical institutions.
Format: Articles
Subject: Outreach, Publications, Reproduction
George Washington Corner (1889-1981)
As the third director of the Carnegie Institute of Washington s Department of Embryology, George Washington Corner made a number of contributions to the life sciences as well as to administration. Corner was born on 12 December 1889 in Baltimore, Maryland, near the newly established Johns Hopkins University. Although Corner was not exposed to science much in school at a young age, he developed an early appreciation for science through conversations with his father about geography and by looking through the family's National Geographic magazines.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Zhang Lizhu (1921- )
Zhang Lizhu is a Chinese gynecologist and researcher. For most of her career, she worked in the Peking Medical College Third Hospital, renamed in 2000, Peking University Third Hospital. There, she led a team of researchers and physicians in the study of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) and embryo transfer (ET) technology. Zhang and her colleagues contributed to the birth of the first test-tube baby in Mainland China in 1988.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Reproduction
The Discovery of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
The term Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) was first published in 1973 in an article published in the British medical journal The Lancet. In that article, a group of pediatricians and psychiatrists at the University of Washington Medical School helped to define the morphological defects and developmental delays that can affect children born to alcoholic mothers. Those observations include pre- and post-natal growth deficiencies, minor facial abnormalities, and damage to the developing brain that can result in behavioral, learning, and cognitive abnormalities.
Format: Articles
Subject: Disorders, Reproduction
Karl Ernst von Baer's Laws of Embryology
In 1828, while working at the University of Konigsberg in Konigsberg, Germany Karl Ernst von Baer proposed four laws of animal development, which came to be called von Baer's laws of embryology. With these laws, von Baer described the development (ontogeny) of animal embryos while also critiquing popular theories of animal development at the time.
Format: Articles
Subject: Theories
Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680)
Jan Swammerdam, known as the founder of the preformation theory based on his extensive research on insect development, was born on 12 February 1637 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Baertje Jans Corvers and Jan Jacobszoon Swammerdam. He began medical school on 11 October 1661 at the University of Leiden. A few of his classmates included Regnier de Graaf, Frederik Ruysch, Niels Stensen (Nicolaus Steno), and Robertus Padtbrugge. Padtbrugge would later join the East India Company and send Swammerdam exotic animals.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Adib Jatene (1929–2014)
Adib Jatene in Brazil was the first surgeon to successfully perform the arterial switch operation in 1975. The operation corrected a heart condition in infants called transposition of the great arteries (TGA). Left untreated, infants with TGA die, as their blood cannot supply oxygen to their bodies. Jatene’s operation became widely used to correct the condition. Aside from medical research, Jatene worked for years in politics and education, serving as Brazil’s minister of health and teaching thoracic surgery at the University of São Paulo.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
The French Flag Model
The French flag model represents how embryonic cells receive and respond to genetic information and subsequently differentiate into patterns. Created by Lewis Wolpert in the late 1960s, the model uses the French tricolor flag as visual representation to explain how embryonic cells can interpret genetic code to create the same pattern even when certain pieces of the embryo are removed. Wolpert's model has provided crucial theoretical framework for investigating universal mechanisms of pattern formation during development.
Format: Articles
Richard Doll (1912–2005)
Richard Doll was an epidemiologist and public figure in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Working primarily at the University of Oxford, in Oxford, England, Doll established a definitive correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Furthermore, Doll’s work helped legitimize epidemiology as a scientific discipline. Doll’s research also helped establish modern guidelines for oncological studies, as well as for contemporary and future research on the effect of smoking on pregnancy and fetal development.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
"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
Margaret (Peggy) Goldwater (1909–1985)
Margaret Goldwater advocated for birth control and reproductive rights in the United States during the twentieth century. Goldwater was a socialite and philanthropist and was married to Barry Goldwater, US Senator from Arizona. She spent much of her life working to further the women's reproductive rights movement, which sought to expand women's legal, social, and physical access to reproductive healthcare, including contraception and abortions.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Reproduction, Outreach
Barry Morris Goldwater (1909–1998)
Barry Morris Goldwater was a Republican Arizona Senator and US presidential candidate in the twentieth-century whose policies supported the women's reproductive rights movement. Goldwater, a businessman and Air Force reservist, transitioned into politics in the 1950s. He helped align popular support for a conservative Republican Party in the 1960s. Throughout his life, he worked to maintain personal liberty and to limit governmental intrusion into citizens' private lives. Goldwater, influenced by his wife Margaret (Peggy) Goldwater, supported women's rights to abortions.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Reproduction, Legal, Religion
Victor Jollos (1887-1941)
Victor Jollos studied fruit flies and
microorganisms in Europe and the US, and he introduced the concept of
Dauermodifikationen in the early 1900s. The concept of
Dauermodifikationen refers to environmentally-induced traits that are
heritable for only a limited number of generations. Some scientists
interpreted the results of Jollos's work on Paramecium and Drosophila as
evidence for cytoplasmic inheritance. Jollos was forced to emigrate from
Germany to the United States due to anti-semitic government policies in
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Ectoderm
Ectoderm is one of three germ layers--groups of cells that coalesce early during the embryonic life of all animals except maybe sponges, and from which organs and tissues form. As an embryo develops, a single fertilized cell progresses through multiple rounds of cell division. Eventually, the clump of cells goes through a stage called gastrulation, during which the embryo reorganizes itself into the three germ layers: endoderm, ectoderm, and mesoderm. After gastrulation, the embryo goes through a process called neurulation, which starts the development of nervous system.
Format: Articles
Subject: Processes
Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act (1921)
In November 1921, US Congress passed the National Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, also called the Sheppard-Towner Act. The Act provided federal funds to states to establish programs to educate people about prenatal health and infant welfare. Advocates argued that it would curb the high infant mortality rate in the US.
Format: Articles
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
Neural Crest
Early in the process of development, vertebrate embryos develop a fold on the neural plate where the neural and epidermal ectoderms meet, called the neural crest. The neural crest produces neural crest cells (NCCs), which become multiple different cell types and contribute to tissues and organs as an embryo develops. A few of the organs and tissues include peripheral and enteric (gastrointestinal) neurons and glia, pigment cells, cartilage and bone of the cranium and face, and smooth muscle.
Format: Articles
Subject: Theories
Julia Clifford Lathrop (1858–1932)
Julia Clifford Lathrop was an activist and social reformer in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and the first chief of the United States Children’s Bureau. In that capacity, she conducted demographic studies to identify links between socioeconomic factors and infant mortality rates. Lathrop mobilized the effort to increase birth registration and designed programs and publications to promote infant and maternal health throughout the US.
Format: Articles
"On the Origin of Mitosing Cells" (1967), by Lynn Sagan
On the Origin of Mitosing Cells by Lynn Sagan appeared in the March 1967 edition of the Journal of Theoretical Biology. At the time the article was published, Lynn Sagan had divorced astronomer Carl Sagan, but kept his last name. Later, she remarried and changed her name to Lynn Margulis, and will be referred to as such throughout this article. In her 1967 article, Margulis develops a theory for the origin of complex cells that have enclosed nuclei, called eukaryotic cells.
Format: Articles
Subject: Publications, Theories
Alfred Day Hershey (1908–1997)
During the twentieth century in the United States, Alfred Day Hershey studied phages, or viruses that infect bacteria, and experimentally verified that genes were made of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Genes are molecular, heritable instructions for how an organism develops. When Hershey started to study phages, scientists did not know if phages contained genes, or whether genes were made of DNA or protein. In 1952, Hershey and his research assistant, Martha Chase, conducted phage experiments that convinced scientists that genes were made of DNA.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
The Hershey-Chase Experiments (1952), by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase
In 1951 and 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase conducted a series of experiments at the Carnegie Institute of Washington in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, that verified genes were made of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Hershey and Chase performed their experiments, later named the Hershey-Chase experiments, on viruses that infect bacteria, also called bacteriophages. The experiments followed decades of scientists’ skepticism about whether genetic material was composed of protein or DNA.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
"Gene Regulation for Higher Cells: A Theory" (1969), by Roy J. Britten and Eric H. Davidson
In 1969, Roy J. Britten and Eric H. Davidson published Gene Regulation for Higher Cells: A Theory, in Science. A Theory proposes a minimal model of gene regulation, in which various types of genes interact to control the differentiation of cells through differential gene expression. Britten worked at the Carnegie Institute of Washington in Washington, D.C., while Davidson worked at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Their paper was an early theoretical and mechanistic description of gene regulation in higher organisms.
Format: Articles
Subject: Publications
Equilibrium Density Gradient Centrifugation in Cesium Chloride Solutions Developed by Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl
Matthew Meselson, Franklin Stahl, and Jerome Vinograd, developed cesium chloride, or CsCl, density gradient centrifugation in the 1950s at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, in Pasadena, California. Density gradient centrifugation enables scientists to separate substances based on size, shape, and density. Meselson and Stahl invented a specific type of density gradient centrifugation, called isopycnic centrifugation that used a solution of cesium chloride to separate DNA molecules based on density alone.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies
“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
Prenatal Care (1913), by Mary Mills West
Prenatal Care is an educational booklet written by Mary Mills West of the US Children’s Bureau and published by the US Government Printing Office in 1913. The Bureau distributed West’s booklets in response to their field studies on infant mortality, which found that lack of access to accurate health and hygiene information put women and infants at greater than normal risk of death or disease. In Prenatal Care, West offers advice on nutrition, exercise, and personal hygiene during pregnancy and describes the processes of labor and birth.
Format: Articles
Subject: Outreach, Publications