Background.

Scientific interest in bioengineering preceded the late-twentieth-century interest in biotechnology that is centered on genetics and on the possibility of altering the genetic makeup of cells and organisms. The early history of bioengineering in the United States is associated with Jacques Loeb. Born in Germany in 1859, Loeb immigrated to the United States in 1891, where he taught biology at the Universities of Chicago and California and from 1910 until his death in 1924 at the Rockefeller Institute.

Loeb and Parthenogenesis.

Parthenogenesis is the process whereby an egg is induced to develop into an organism without having been fertilized. Both Loeb and Thomas Hunt Morgan, the most prominent American geneticist, had experimented with sea urchin eggs. Morgan had induced them to segment by immersing them in a solution of inorganic salts, although they failed to produce larvae. Loeb, using a variation of the same procedure...