Developments in Embryology
Overview
At the beginning of the twentieth century, embryologists, following the principles established by Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924) and Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch (1867-1941), were actively investigating the question of how factors intrinsic or extrinsic to an egg could govern the development of the embryo. Hans Spemann (1869-1941) refined the techniques of experimental embryology and carried out systematic studies of embryonic development. The "organizer experiment," performed by Spemann's doctoral student, Hilde Mangold, demonstrated that, when the embryonic region known as the dorsal lip was grafted onto a host embryo, it induced the formation of a new embryo. Moreover, the secondary embryo was composed of a mosaic of cells from the host and the donor. The dorsal lip region was, therefore, called the "organizer region."
Background
Wilhelm Roux, who saw himself as the founder of a new discipline that he called "developmental mechanics," argued that embryologists must adopt experimental methods as the tools that would make possible the analysis of the immediate causes of development. The primary question Roux posed was whether development proceeded by means of self-differentiation or correlative dependent differentiation. Self-differentiation was defined as the capacity of the egg or of any part ofthe embryo to undergo further differentiation independently of extraneous factors or of neighboring parts in the embryo.
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