Biology 376 - Animal Development Quotations
Note: I cannot claim credit for finding the originals for most of these quotations. Most come from other authors and their texts, especially from Gilbert's Developmental Biology. (Note: starting with the 11th edition, this venerable textbook is now by Gilbert & Barresi.)
Page last updated: 8 Aug 17
If "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," we now find that "nothing in morphological evolution makes sense without knowledge of development."Scott Gilbert, 2016
in the preface to Developmental Biology, 11th Edition
Metamorphosis is a time of redefinition and dramatic developmental transition. ...
Today there's a feeling in the air that developmental biology is about to undergo another metamorphic molt.
Don't panic!
...
Development has always been a science of syntheses and relationships, and these will be major themes for all
sciences in the 21st century. Developmental biology will become a "biology without borders." The new developmental
biology may be simultaneously molecular, ecological, evolutionary and physiological. I would be surprised if it were not.
"Developmental biology is dead. Long live developmental biology!"
Scott Gilbert, 2014
in the preface to Developmental Biology, 10th Edition
So I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year, so I opened up my laptop and found out that I was the schnook.
Marty Chalfie, 2008
Having set his phone to ring softly, Chalfie missed the call from Sweden (and all the reporters), only later learning he was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Nobel was awarded jointly to Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura for their discovery, application and further development of green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a research tool. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of GFP (and now the many more available fluorescent proteins) to developmental biology research.
The stories are in every newspaper: cloning, stem cells, genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, cancer therapies, organ regeneration, and protocols for prolonging our lifespan. In the past five years, developmental biology has usurped a place formerly occupied by science fiction.
...these technologies are bringing developmental biology into the social sphere as it never has been before. Students taking developmental biology classes should be able to explain to their classmates (and parents) the science behind the news stories...
...developmental biologists (both current and emergent) need to think about the implications of our research.
Scott Gilbert, 2003
in the preface to Developmental Biology, 7th Edition
Der Begriff des Organisators problematisch wurde, ein toter Organisator ist ein Widerspruch in sich selbst. (The concept of the Organizer became problematic, since a dead Organizer is a contradiction in terms.)
Hans Spemann, 1936
[CL - my translation - Spemann is referring to the problem caused by the subsequent discovery by scientists that substances such as sand, turpentine, methylene blue, boiled guinea pig liver and formaldehyde-fixed dorsal lip could take the place of live dorsal lip in causing 'primary induction' - the apparent induction of neural development in the overlying dorsal ectoderm by dorsal mesoderm. We now understand that the more default developmental pathway for ectoderm is neural vs. epidermal, and that the organizer acts more to inhibit the formation of epidermal ectoderm. In the experimental organism used, it was easy to disrupt this inhibition, and allow ectoderm to develop into nervous system. This was an example of an unfortunate bad choice in experimental system that sidetracked experimental embryology into a non-productive area. The search for chemical inducers ('Chemical Embryology') was premature, really requiring the revolutions of modern molecular biology, molecular genetics and biochemistry to make real progress.]
Thus we want a multicellular organism which has a short life cycle, can be easily cultivated, and is small enough to be handled in large numbers, like a micro-organism. It should have relatively few cells, so that exhaustive studies of lineage and patterns can be made, and should be amenable to genetic analysis. We think we have a good candidate in the form of a small nematode worm...
Sydney Brenner, 1963 - 2002 Nobel Prize winner
It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.
Lewis Wolpert
The amoeba and the paramecium are potentially immortal...But for Volvox, death seems to be as inevitable as it is in a mouse or in a man. Volvox must die because it had children and is no longer needed. When its time comes it drops quietly to the bottom and joins its ancestors.
Joseph Wood Krutchfield, 1956
Flies almost certainly evolved from insects with four wings instead of two and insects are believed to have come from arthropod forms with many legs instead of six. During the evolution of the fly, two major groups of genes must have evolved: "leg-supressing" genes which removed legs from abdominal segments of millipede-like ancestors followed by "haltere-promoting" genes which supressed the second pair of wings of four-winged ancestors. If evolution indeed prodeeded in this way, then mutations in the latter group of genes should produce four-winged flies and mutations in the former group, flies with extra legs.
E. B. Lewis, 1978 (Nature 276: 565) - 1995 Nobel Prize winner.
One of the critical differences between you [as an embryo] and a machine is that the machine is never required to function until after it is built. Every animal has to function as it builds itself.
Scott Gilbert, 2000 [p. 3, Developmental Biology, 6th Edition]
All we know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, another vesicle; and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better glass, he finds within the last observed another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
(Thanks to Allison Dushane for this quotation.)
What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of a horse, the paddle of a porpoise, and the wing of a bat should all be constructed on the same pattern and should include similar bones, and in the same relative positions?
Charles Darwin, 1859
Indeed, the homeobox has been called the Rosetta Stone* of developmental biology...
Scott Gilbert (paraphrasing others), 1994
[*What's the Rosetta Stone? This black granite tablet, discovered in the coastal city of Rosetta (Rashid) by the French army under Napoleon in 1799 after their invasion of Egypt, was the key to
deciphering the writings of ancient Egypt. The document contains a proclamation written in two languages - ancient Greek (known) and ancient Egyptian (unknown). The Egyptian was written in two different previously indecipherable forms: heiroglyphics and demotic, a cursive script for everyday use (derived from heiroglyphics). The stone was later surrendered to the British who defeated the French in Egypt in 1801 and came to the British Museum in London in 1803, where it now resides.]
The chief advantage of Drosophila initially was one that historians have overlooked: it was an excellent organism for student projects.
Robert E. Kohler, 1994
Ihr habt den Weg vom Wurm zum Menschen gemacht, und Vieles ist in euch noch Wurm. (You have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm.)
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883, from Also Sprach Zarathustra
If you asked a sceptic, who doubted that every species of animals is created for an end, and has its place and object assigned by the Creator to name some of those he regarded as useless, it is not at all improbable that he would select the Worm and the Fly.
J. Samuelson, 1858
We have good news and bad news. The good news is that by the end of this decade, we may know most, if not all, of the transcriptions factors active in many cell types and how they interact to initiate or repress transcription. The bad news is that many of us will have to learn physical chemistry to understand these data.
Scott Gilbert, 1997 [p. 424, Developmental Biology, 5th Edition]
Studying the period of cleavage we approach the source whence emerge the progressively branched streams of differentiation that end finally in almost quiet pools, the individual cells of the complex adult organism.
E. E. Just, 1939
One must must show the greatest respect towards any thing that increases exponentially, no matter how small.
Garrett Hardin, 1968
