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Arizona State University Embryo Project Photograph Collections
In the 1970s Stanford University Embryologist Harold Heath sent a box of photographs to Frederick B. Churchill, who was a Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Indiana University. Heath was born in Indiana, he knew that Churchill was the leading historian of embryology, and he wanted his photographs to be used and therefore wanted them to be housed somewhere with an interest in the history of biology. Heath made it clear that he was donating the photographs for use by scholars and the public.
Format: Articles
Subject: Outreach
Magnetic Resonance Microscopy (MRM)
Magnetic Resonance Microscopy (MRM) is an imaging method that allows the visualization of internal body structures. Using powerful magnets to send energy into cells, MRM picks up signals from inside a specimen and translates them into detailed computer images. MRM is a useful tool for scientists because of its ability to generate digital slices of scanned specimens that can be constructed into virtual 3D images without destroying the specimens. MRM has become an increasingly prevalent imaging technique in embryological studies.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies
Free Hospital for Women Scrapbook by Harvard University Library
This scrapbook is part of the Harvard University Library's collection on "Working Women, 1800-1930," which is itself part of the Open Collections Program. The print version is located at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. It contains information about the hospital, including articles from newspapers, magazines, and other publications; photographs of the hospital, employees, and special events; lecture announcements; letters and other forms of correspondence; ration cards; tickets; forms; certificates; posters; programs; and playbills.
Format: Articles
Subject: Organizations, Ethics, Reproduction
Jacques Loeb (1859-1924)
Jacques Loeb experimented on embryos in Europe and the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Among the first to study embryos through experimentation, Loeb helped found the new field of experimental embryology. Notably, Loeb showed scientists how to create artificial parthenogenesis, thus refuting the idea that spermatozoa alone were necessary to develop eggs into embryos and confirming the idea that the chemical constitution of embryos environment affected their development.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Hanging Drop Tissue Culture
The hanging drop tissue culture is a technique utilized in embryology and other fields to allow growth that would otherwise be restricted by the flat plane of culture dishes and also to minimize the surface area to volume ratio, slowing evaporation. The classic hanging drop culture is a small drop of liquid, such as plasma or some other media allowing tissue growth, suspended from an inverted watch glass. The hanging drop is then suspended by gravity and surface tension, rather than spreading across a plate.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies
Fate Mapping Techniques
For more than 2000 years, embryologists, biologists, and philosophers have studied and detailed the processes that follow fertilization. The fertilized egg proliferates into cells that begin to separate into distinct, identifiable zones that will eventually become adult structures through the process of morphogenesis. As the cells continue to multiply, patterns form and cells begin to differentiate, and eventually commit to their fate.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies
Environment and Birth Defects (1973), by James G. Wilson
Environment and Birth Defects by James Graves Wilson in the US was published in 1973. The book summarized information on the causes of malformations in newborns and aimed to acquaint policy makers with Wilson's suggestions for predicting the risks of environmental causes of birth defects, called teratogens. Wilson also provided six principles for researching teratogens, a framework revised from his 1959 article Experimental Studies on Congenital Malformations. The book has ten chapters.
Format: Articles
Subject: Publications
Father Frank Pavone (1959- )
Father Frank Pavone, a key proponent of the Roman Catholic Church's pro-life movement, has devoted his life's work to ending abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and other techniques and procedures that he believes threaten human life from conception to death. His contributions to the pro-life movement include founding a new religious order called the Missionaries of the Gospel of Life and participating in high-profile protests and television interviews for the pro-life cause.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Religion, Reproduction
Ziegler Wax Embryo Models
Three-dimensional anatomical models have long been essential to the learning of science and lend a sense of "control" to those practicing in the field. As the development of embryology grew in importance during the late 1800s, so did the need for models to show intricate details of embryos.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies, Reproduction
Hamburger-Hamilton Staging Series (1951)
In 1951 Viktor Hamburger and Howard Hamilton created an embryonic staging series from a combination of photographs and drawings from other researchers. The Hamburger-Hamilton stages are a sequence of images depicting 46 chronological stages in chick development. The images begin with a fertilized egg and end with a fully developed chick. The Hamburger-Hamilton staging series was produced in order to replace a previous chick staging series created in 1900. The earlier attempt lacked specific details and staged the chick embryo by using only morphological characteristics.
Format: Articles
Subject: Processes
Leon Richard Kass (1939- )
A PhD and medical doctor turned ethicist, Leon Kass calls himself an unlicensed humanist. Throughout his unique career he has sought to impact others and engage important cultural issues. This he has accomplished over the course of many years by studying biochemistry, teaching humanities, writing articles and books on ethics, and serving as chair of the President's Council on Bioethics.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Ethics, Reproduction
"Induction and Patterning of the Primitive Streak, an Organizing Center of Gastrulation in the Amniote" (2004), by Takashi Mikawa, Alisa M. Poh, Kristine A. Kelly, Yasuo Ishii, and David E. Reese
"Induction and Patterning of the Primitive Streak, an Organizing Center of Gastrulation in the Amniote," (hereafter referred to as "Induction") examines the mechanisms underlying early amniote gastrulation and the formation of the primitive streak and midline axis. The review, authored by Takashi Mikawa and colleagues at Cornell University Medical College, was published in Developmental Dynamics in 2004.
Format: Articles
Subject: Publications
Quickening
Quickening, the point at which a pregnant woman can first feel the movements of the growing embryo or fetus, has long been considered a pivotal moment in pregnancy. Over time, this experience has been used in a variety of contexts, ranging from representing the point of ensoulment to determining whether an abortion was legal to indicating the gender of the unborn baby; philosophy, theology, and law all address the idea of quickening in detail. Beginning with Aristotle, quickening divided the developmental stages of embryo and fetus.
Format: Articles
Subject: Processes, Ethics, Reproduction
Ricardo Hector Asch (1947- )
Ricardo Hector Asch was born 26 October 1947 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a lawyer and French professor, Bertha, and a doctor and professor of surgery, Miguel. Asch's middle-class family lived among the largest Jewish community in Latin America, where a majority of males were professionals. After his graduation from National College No. 3 Mariano Moreno in Buenos Aires, Asch worked as a teaching assistant in human reproduction and embryology at the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine where he received his medical degree in 1971.
Format: Articles
The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1910-1939)
From its founding in 1910 until it closed its doors in 1939, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York was the center of the American Eugenics Movement. Charles Davenport, a geneticist and biologist, founded the ERO, and served as its director until 1934. Under the direction of Davenport and his associate, superintendant Harry H. Laughlin, the influence of the ERO on science and public policy waxed during the early twentieth century until after World War II.
Format: Articles
Subject: Organizations, Reproduction
Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Sir Francis Galton was a British science writer and amateur researcher of the late nineteenth century. He contributed greatly to the fields of statistics, experimental psychology and biometry. In the history of biology, Galton is widely regarded as the originator of the early twentieth century eugenics movement. Galton published influential writings on nature versus nurture in human personality traits, developed a family study method to identify possible inherited traits, and devised laws of genetic inheritance prior to the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work.
Format: Articles
Subject: People, Reproduction
Alexis Carrel's Tissue Culture Techniques
Alexis Carrel, the prominent French surgeon, biologist, and 1912 Nobel Prize laureate for Physiology or Medicine, was one of the pioneers in developing and modifying tissue culture techniques. The publicized work of Carrel and his associates at the Rockefeller Institute established the practice of long-term tissue culture for a wide variety of cells. At the same time, some aspects of their work complicated the operational procedures of tissue culture.
Format: Articles
Subject: Technologies
"Cellular death in morphogenesis of the avian wing" (1962), by John W. Saunders Jr., et al.
In the early 1960s, John W. Saunders Jr., Mary T. Gasseling, and Lilyan C. Saunders in the US investigated how cells die in the developing limbs of chick embryos. They studied when and where in developing limbs many cells die, and they studied the functions of cell death in wing development. At a time when only a few developmental biologists studied cell death, or apoptosis, Saunders and his colleagues showed that researchers could use embryological experiments to uncover the causal mechanisms of apotosis.
Format: Articles
Subject: Experiments
Gail Roberta Martin (1944– )
In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Gail Roberta Martin specialized in biochemistry and embryology, more specifically cellular communication and the development of organs. In 1981, she named any cell taken from inside a human embryo at the blastocyst stage an “embryonic stem cell”. During development, an embryo goes through the blastocyst stage just before it implants in the uterus. Embryonic stem cells are useful for experiments because they are self-renewing and able to develop into almost any cell type in the body.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Mesenchyme
Mesenchyme is a type of animal tissue comprised of loose cells embedded in a mesh of proteins and fluid, called the extracellular matrix. The loose, fluid nature of mesenchyme allows its cells to migrate easily and play a crucial role in the origin and development of morphological structures during the embryonic and fetal stages of animal life. Mesenchyme directly gives rise to most of the body's connective tissues, from bones and cartilage to the lymphatic and circulatory systems.
Format: Articles
Subject: Processes
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
John Bertrand Gurdon (1933- )
Sir John Bertrand Gurdon further developed nuclear transplantation, the technique used to clone organisms and to create stem cells, while working in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. Gurdon's research built on the work of Thomas King and Robert Briggs in the United States, who in 1952 published findings that indicated that scientists could take a nucleus from an early embryonic cell and successfully transfer it into an unfertilized and enucleated egg cell.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840)
In eighteenth century Germany, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach studied how individuals within a species vary, and to explain such variations, he proposed that a force operates on organisms as they develop. Blumenbach used metrical methods to study the history of humans, but he was also a natural historian and theorist. Blumenbach argued for theories of the transformation of species, or the claim that new species can develop from existing forms.
Format: Articles
Subject: People
The Cabinet of Frederik Ruysch
Frederik Ruysch's cabinet of curiosities, commonly referred to simply as the Cabinet, was a museum Ruysch created in the Netherlands in the late 160ss. The Cabinet filled a series of small houses that Ruysch rented in Amsterdam and contained over 2,000 specimens, including preserved fetuses and infants. The collection remained in Amsterdam until it was purchased by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia in 1717 and transferred to St. Petersburg, Russia.
Format: Articles
Subject: Organizations, Outreach
Carl Richard Moore (1892-1955)
Carl Richard Moore was a professor and researcher at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois who studied sex hormones in animals from 1916 until his death in 1955. Moore focused on the role of hormones on sex differentiation in offspring, the optimal conditions for sperm production, and the effects of vasectomy or testicular implants on male sex hormone production. Moore's experiments to create hermaphrodites in the laboratory contributed to the theory of a feedback loop between the pituitary and fetal gonadal hormones to control sex differentiation.
Format: Articles
Subject: People