Organising the embryo

From DeRobertis, 2006

How does a fertilised egg develop into a complex organism with trillions of cells? It is a question that has plagued generations of developmental biologists. At the turn of the 20th century, Hans Spemann and his graduate student Hilde Mangold performed one of the seminal experiments in developmental biology. The pair performed “cut-and-paste” experiments that elucidated the organising function of the upper blastopore lip of the gastrulating embryo. While this was not the first example of such an experiment, its use of the two salamander species with different pigmentation patterns allowed scientists to determine the contribution of explants to different embryos. Despite their primitive means (Spemann allegedly chased young boys around town to find hair fine enough to divide the developing embryos), the results and conclusions of Mangold and Spemann have formed the backbone of developmental biology for close to a century.

• The original paper (as were most scientific papers at the time) was published in German, and is (perhaps by necessity) quite long. A translation is found here.