On the 10 th anniversary of the announcement of the draft sequence of the 3 billion DNA bases in the genome by the Human Genome Project, there is still a lack of molecular targeted therapies for previously intractable diseases. It has become clear that the genomes within and across species are too similar to explain the diversity of life and the etiology of all diseases, indicating that the und...

Joseph Needham [4] was an embryologist and biochemist who is most noted in science for his studies on induction [5] in developing embryos. Needham worked with Conrad Hal Waddington [6] to attempt to identify the compound responsible for the organizer?s activity. Although he was not successful in discovering the chemical, he and Waddington learned much about the organizer [7]. Needham was a meti...

Possums is a 174-page book consisting of a series of essays written about the Virginia opossum [3] (Didelphis virginiana [4]), the only living marsupial in the US. The essays were written by Carl Gottfried Hartman, an embryologist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington (CIW), in Baltimore, Maryland, who also worked with another mammal [5], the rhesus monkey [6] . Possums was published in 1952 ...

Hans Spemann [5] was an experimental embryologist best known for his transplantation studies [6] and as the originator of the ?organizer? concept. One of his earliest experiments involved constricting the blastomeres of a fertilized salamander [7] egg [8] with a noose of fine baby hair, resulting in a partially double embryo with two heads and one tail. Spemann continued changing variables such...

The aim of this article is to suggest that some scientific instruments may be considered worthy of their own biographies and that such a genre may have its own merits and charms. The instrument chosen to exemplify this point is a Hartnack microscope objective lens of about 1860 which served, in turn, the histologist and anatomist Albert von Kölliker, the comparative anatomist Robert Wiedersheim...

During the 1870s and early 1880s, the British morphologist Francis Maitland Balfour contributed in important ways to the budding field of evolutionary embryology [4], especially through his comparative embryological approach to uncovering ancestral relationships between groups. As developmental biologist and historian Brian Hall [5] has observed, the field of evolutionary embryology [4] in the ...

A critical factor that influences the success of an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment cycle is quality transferred embryo. Embryo morphology assessments, conventionally performed through manual microscopic analysis suffer from disparities in practice, selection criteria, and subjectivity due to experience embryologist. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are powerful, promising algorithms...