Laudatio Nicole Le Douarin

On behalf of the ISDB it is my privilege and honour to introduce to you the Ross G. Harrison prize winner, Nicole Le Douarin. It is hard fo me to imagine a more deserving recipient. The prize is named after Ross Harrison, a founding father of tissue culture and of hetero-specific grafting. In his experiments, Ross Harrison described a number of chimerae in which heads of dark Rana silvatica lavae were united with paler bodies of Rana palustas lavae. These experiments provided valuable information as to the mode of development of the lateral line sense organs, but equally important was the demonstration of the value of heteroplastic grafting for the performance of crucial investigations. Nicole perfected this concept and used it to make innumerable contributions to Developmental Biology. Nicole started her research career in 1958 under the sponsorship of Professor Etienne Wolf, who was, at this time the director of the Institut d’Embryologie at the CNRS and College de France in Nogent-sur-Marne. Initially she only worked part time since she was a high school teacher and raised two daughters, but she was able to convince Dr. Etienne Wolf that she was committed to a career in developmental biology. She became a full time researcher in 1960 and completed her doctorate in 1964 with a thesis devoted to the ontogenetic processes directing the development of the liver and the digestive tract in the avian embryo. Nicole initially became interested in morphogenetic movements which assemble and constitute the digestive tract and its appendages. She showed that inductive interactions between mesoderm and endoderm were required during hepatogenesis.