Research in chemical induction seeks to identify the compound or compounds responsible for differentiation in a developing embryo. Soren Lovtrup compared the search for these compounds to the search for the philosopher's stone. It was based on the assumption that the differentiating agents have to be chemical substances either within cells or in the extracellular matrix. However, despite numerous efforts to understand them, the nature of these substances remained largely a mystery from the 1930s until the 1980s, when the new era of molecular induction based on molecular genetics provided a new perspective. During the period of emphasis on chemical induction, a variety of different experiments were conducted aimed at discovering the chemical nature of the inducer. In some experiments, the organizer region was killed by heat to assess the inducing ability of a dead organizer. Other experiments used natural and synthetic compounds to attempt. Although none of these experiments identified a chemical inducer with any certainty, they did discover many related properties of the developing embryo.

The syncytial theory of neural development was proposed by Victor Hensen in 1864 to explain the growth and differentiation of the nervous system. This theory has since been discredited, although it held a significant following at the turn of the twentieth century. Neural development was well studied but poorly understood, so Hensen proposed a simple model of development. The syncytial theory predicted that the nervous system was composed of many neurons with shared cytoplasm. These nerves were thought to be present in the embryo from a very early stage and were selected by the function of the target tissue. There were two competing theories to the syncytial theory. Theodor Schwann and Francis Maitland Balfour proposed the sheath cell theory, which states that nerve fibers were the product of secretions by chains of sheath cells. Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Wilhelm His proposed the outgrowth theory of fiber development for individual neurons. The most substantial evidence against the syncytial theory of neural development was produced by Ross Granville Harrison in his studies of the development of nerve fibers.

Conrad Hal Waddington's "Experiments on the Development of Chick and Duck Embryos, Cultivated in vitro," published in 1932 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, compares the differences in the development of birds and amphibians. Previous experiments focused on the self differentiation of individual tissues in birds, but Waddington wanted to study induction in greater detail. The limit to these studies had been the amount of time an embryo could be successfully cultivated ex vivo. Waddington applied in vitro cell culturing techniques to this experiment, as opposed to the chorio-allantoic technique used in many earlier studies. Culturing in vitro consisted of placing the embryo on a clot of adult chicken blood plasma and chick embryo extract in a watch glass. Experiments reported in this paper were divided into three main sections: the development of the embryos in vitro, induction by the endoderm, and induction by the primitive streak.

The epigenetic landscape is a concept representing embryonic development. It was proposed by Conrad Hal Waddington to illustrate the various developmental pathways a cell might take toward differentiation. The epigenetic landscape integrates the connected concepts of competence, induction, and regulative abilities of the genes into a single model designed to explain cellular differentiation, a long standing problem in embryology.

Rita Levi-Montalcini is a Nobel Laureate recognized for her work in the discovery and characterization of nerve growth factor. Nerve growth factor (NGF) promotes the growth and maintenance of the nervous system in a developing system. The majority of her career has been devoted to investigating the many aspects of NGF.

Nerve growth factor (NGF) is a signaling protein and growth factor implicated in a wide range of development and maintenance functions. NGF was discovered through a series of experiments in the 1950s on the development of the chick nervous system. Since its discovery, NGF has been found to act in a variety of tissues throughout development and adulthood. It has been implicated in immune function, stress response, nerve maintenance, and in neurodegenerative diseases. It is named for its effect on the critical role it plays in the growth and organization of the nervous system during embryonic development.

The paper "Formation of Genetically Mosaic Mouse Embryos and Early Development of Lethal (t12/t12)-Normal Mosaics," by Beatrice Mintz, describes a technique to fuse two mouse embryos into a single embryo. This work was published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology in 1964. When two embryos are correctly joined before the 32-cell stage, the embryo will develop normally and exhibit a mosaic pattern of cells as an adult. Mosaics were easily characterized by mouse fusions from embryos of different colors; this produced clearly visible color patterns identifying the alternate cell types. Mintz referred to the fused mice as mosaic or later as allophenic, but they are more commonly known today as chimeras.

Viktor Hamburger was an embryologist who focused on neural development. His scientific career stretched from the early 1920s as a student of Hans Spemann to the late 1980s at Washington University resolving the role of nerve growth factor in the life of neurons. Hamburger is noted for his systematic approach to science and a strict attention to detail. Throughout his life he maintained an interest in nature and the arts, believing both were important to his scientific work.

Washington University in St. Louis served as the backdrop for many scientific discoveries, including that of nerve growth factor (NGF). Many of the accomplishments in embryology at Washington University can be attributed to the influence of Viktor Hamburger. He served as chair of the zoology department for twenty-five years. One of the few Nobel Prizes given for embryological research was awarded to faculty members Hamburger hired; Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen won for their role in the discovery of nerve growth factor.

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. This allows tissues or other cell types to be examined without being squashed against a dish.