Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

Anatomical models have always been a mainstay of descriptive embryology. As the training of embryologists grew in the late 1800s, so too did the need for large-scale teaching models. Embryo wax models, such as those made by Adolf Ziegler and Gustav Born, were popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century as a way to visualize, in three dimensions, the fine detail of embryos without the aid of a microscope. While these models were found in many university laboratories, museums of science, and even expositions and world's fairs, they were anything but easy to make or obtain. Wax modeling required skill, patience, and specialized tools. Small laboratories with only one or two embryologists often found the prospect of wax modeling too laborious, too difficult, and too expensive to make the pursuit worthwhile. As an alternative, Susanna Phelps Gage, an embryologist at Cornell University, perfected a technique of using stacks of absorbent blotting paper rather than stacks of wax plates for constructing embryo models. She first demonstrated her blotting paper method to other embryologists at the annual meeting of the Association of American Anatomists in 1905 and later at the International Zoological Congress, held in Boston in August 1907.

First manufactured in 1988 by Serono laboratories, recombinant gonadotropins are synthetic hormones that can stimulate egg production in women for use in fertility treatments. Recombinant gonadotropins are artificially created using recombinant DNA technology, a technology that joins together DNA from different organisms. In vertebrates, naturally-occurring gonadotropins regulate the growth and function of the gonads, known as testes in males and ovaries in females. Medical professionals can derive female gonadotropins from the urine of pregnant and post-menopausal women, often using it to facilitate in vitro fertilization, or IVF. With the rapid development of assisted reproductive technologies like IVF, demand for human-derived gonadotropins rose to a global yearly demand of 120 million liters of urine by the beginning of the twenty-first century, which resulted in a demand that could not be met by traditional technologies at that time. Therefore, researchers created recombinant gonadotropins to establish a safer and more consistent method of human gonadotropin collection that met the high demand for its use in fertility treatments.

As the third director of the Carnegie Institute of Washington s Department of Embryology, George Washington Corner made a number of contributions to the life sciences as well as to administration. Corner was born on 12 December 1889 in Baltimore, Maryland, near the newly established Johns Hopkins University. Although Corner was not exposed to science much in school at a young age, he developed an early appreciation for science through conversations with his father about geography and by looking through the family's National Geographic magazines.

In 2016, Runaway Films released the documentary Vegas Baby. The film, directed by Amanda Micheli, follows three women who struggle with infertility problems as they undergo in vitro fertilization, or IVF treatment, to become pregnant. In IVF treatment, a woman’s egg is fertilized by a sperm outside of the woman’s body. Once the sperm fertilizes the egg, a fertility doctor places the fertilized egg back into the woman’s uterus. The three women in the film enter the I Believe contest hosted by the Sher Institute of Reproductive Medicine in Las Vegas, Nevada. A panel of judges chooses the winner, who is awarded a free single cycle of IVF treatment. Although only one of the women presented in the documentary wins the contest, the other two women still undergo IVF treatment. Vegas Baby brought awareness to both the infertility problems experienced by couples and IVF treatment as an alternative method for causing pregnancy.

Franklin Paine Mall was born into a farming family in Belle Plaine, Iowa, on 28 September 1862. While he attended a local academy, an influential teacher fueled Mall's interest in science. From 1880-1883, he studied medicine at the University of Michigan, attaining his MD degree in 1883. William J. Mayo, who later became a famous surgeon and co-founder of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was a classmate of Mall's. Throughout his studies at Michigan, he was influenced by Corydon L. Ford, a professor of anatomy, Victor C. Vaughn, a biochemist and bacteriologist, and Henry Sewall, a physiologist.

Howard Wilber Jones Jr. and his wife, Georgeanna Seegar Jones, developed a method of in vitro fertilization and helped create the first baby in the US using that method. Though the first in vitro baby was born in England in 1978, Jones and his wife's contribution allowed for the birth of Elizabeth Carr on 28 December 1981. Jones, a gynecologist and an obstetrician, researched human reproduction for most of his life.

In 2012, the production company Waddell Media Production released the documentary The Baby Makers. The four-part series, directed and produced by Edel O’Mahony, follows multiple couples in Northern Ireland struggling with infertility problems as they utilize different treatments such as in vitro fertilization, or IVF, egg donation, and egg freezing. IVF is a procedure in which a woman’s egg is fertilized by a sperm outside of her body. Once the sperm fertilizes the egg, a fertility doctor places the fertilized egg back into the woman’s uterus. A narrator narrates the film, which features interviews with gynecologists and clinical embryologists. The Baby Makers brought awareness to infertility problems that couples in Northern Ireland experienced and IVF treatment, egg donation, and egg freezing as alternative methods for getting pregnant.

In 1984, human genetics and reproduction researcher and physician Joseph D. Schulman founded the Genetics and IVF Institute, an international organization that provides infertility treatment and genetic services to patients. IVF stands for in vitro fertilization, an infertility treatment in which a female egg is fertilized by male sperm outside of the female body. GIVF is headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, in association with Inova Health System, formerly called the Fairfax Hospital Association, one of the largest regional hospital systems in the United States. GIVF offers multiple infertility and genetic services including IVF, donor egg and donor sperm programs, prenatal genetic diagnostic testing, and sex selection technology. GIVF was one of the first medical facilities in the United States to offer IVF and has innovated other infertility treatments and genetic services.

The Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHR Act) is a piece of federal legislation passed by the Parliament of Canada. The Act came into force on 29 March 2004. Many sections of the Act were struck down following a 2010 Supreme Court of Canada ruling on its constitutionality. The AHR Act sets a legislative and regulatory framework for the use of reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization and related services including surrogacy and gamete donation. The Act also regulates research in Canada involving in vitro embryos. The AHR Act was the first law in Canada to regulate the use of reproductive technologies and related research. Most other Canadian policies on AHR rely on the Act and its provisions. By 2015, Canada was one of only a few countries worldwide to comprehensively address assisted human reproduction through policy.

The goal of science education in the United States is promoting scientific literacy for all students. The goal necessitates understanding the nature of science-what science is as a body of knowledge, explanatory tool, and human enterprise. The history of science is one of the most long-standing pedagogical methods of getting at the nature of science. But scientific literacy also encompasses education in scientific inquiry, and in the relationships among science, technology, and society (STS), as well as fact and theory-based subject-matter content.