Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

In 1987, the World Health Organization, or WHO, took action to improve the quality of maternal health around the world through the declaration of the Safe Motherhood Initiative, or the SMI, at an international conference concerning maternal mortality in Nairobi, Kenya. Initially, the SMI aimed to reduce the prevalence of maternal mortality around the world, as over 500,000 women died during pregnancy and childbirth annually at the time of its inception, while about 98 percent of those deaths occurred in low-income countries. While WHO led the initiative, many organizations in various countries participated in additional programs in order to implement the goals of the SMI. WHO developed the SMI in order to reduce the prevalence of maternal death, developing one of the first proposals that brought attention to maternal health on a global basis at a time when global maternal mortality was high.

Jacques Loeb published The Mechanistic Conception of Life in 1912. Loeb's goal for the book was to further disseminate his explanations of organic processes, such as embryonic development and organisms orientations to their environments, which relied on physics and chemistry. Loeb also wanted to provide an alternative explanatory framework to vitalism and what he called romantic evolutionism, then both widespread. Loeb mined his work on tropisms and artificial parthenogenesis, both of which he considered central to biology, to show that physicochemical explanations accounted for some of the most perplexing organic phenomena. Thus, for those processes, anyone who appealed to vitalism or romantic evolutionism offered impotent explanations. The Mechanistic Conception of Life established Loeb's widespread reputation as a mechanist, both to the public and to generations of biologists.

On 26 April 2014, Gravitas Ventures released the documentary The Milky Way, a film directed by Jon Fitzgerald that compares breastfeeding in the US with breastfeeding in European countries. The film was produced by Piece of My Heart Productions and Cause Pictures. In the film, producers Jennifer Davidson and Chantal Molnar travel to Berlin, Germany, and Stockholm, Sweden, to observe how people perceive breastfeeding there, compared to in the US. Breastfeeding provides multiple benefits to both the infant and mother, including infants developing a healthy immune system and mothers recovering from birth at an increased rate. The film shows how women in the US are inhibited by limited maternity leave compared to women in European countries. The Milky Way provides viewers with information about breastfeeding in the US compared to other European countries and the impact that formula companies have on women and infants.

The most-watched NOVA documentary ever made and a revolution in the understanding of human development, The Miracle of Life (abbreviated Life) employs the most current developments in endoscopic and microscopic technology to capture the intricacies of human development. Narrated by Anita Sangiolo and vividly illustrating the most minute and hard-to-reach parts and processes of living systems, this film truly flexes the muscles of the newest photographic technology of its time, with esteemed photographer Lennart Nilsson behind the camera. Aired in 1983, Life was the first documentary of its kind, clearly explaining, in under an hour, biological systems that many people had never seen before. The film was written and produced by Bebe Nixon and directed by Bo G. Erikson. What follows is a description of the film, along with a brief analysis of its impact.

First published in 1930 and reprinted in 1972, Edward Stuart Russell's The Interpretation of Development and Heredity is a work of philosophical and theoretical biology. In this book Russell outlines a methodological and philosophical program aimed at reorienting the biological understanding of development and heredity. He argues that the mechanistic perspective on development and heredity ignores aspects of biological phenomena that can only be analyzed if biologists view organisms as whole entities, rather than breaking down developmental and hereditary processes into small causal units. This book is representative of Russell's broad philosophical approach to biology, called "organicism".

In 2002, Miramax Entertainment released The Magdalene Sisters, a film that portrays an interpretation of the true events experienced by four young women who were forcibly placed into a Magdalene asylum in Dublin, Ireland, in 1964. Catholic nuns ran Magdalene asylums throughout the world, where they forced women whom society deemed sexually promiscuous to perform hard labor in their laundry facilities. The film portrays the experiences of four women, Margaret, Bernadette, Rose, and Crispina, as they experienced negative treatment from the nuns and sought escape. Directed by Peter Mullan, The Magdalene Sisters provided a means to see how women, including unwed mothers, prostitutes, and those with disabilities, were affected by Magdalene laundries in Ireland.

The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics is a book published in 1924, written by Paul Kammerer, who studied developmental biology in Vienna, Austria, in the early twentieth century. The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics summarizes Kammerer's experiments, and explains their significance. In his book, Kammerer aims to explain how offspring inherit traits from their parents. Some scholars criticized Kammerer's reports and interpretations, arguing that they were inaccurate and misleading, while others supported Kammerer's work. Kammerer said that the results of his experiments demonstrated that organisms could adapt to different environments by acquiring new features during the course of their lifetimes, and that they transmitted those acquired features to their offspring.

Mary Coffin Ware Dennett, a supporter of sex education for children in the US in the early twentieth century, wrote The Sex Education of Children: A Book for Parents as a resource for parents teaching their children about sex. Vanguard Press in New York City, New York, published The Sex Education of Children in 1931. Dennett’s book addresses issues that Dennett argued parents should know about sex to provide their children with an accurate portrayal of the topic. In addition to expressing Dennett’s views on sex education, The Sex Education of Children was one of the few works during the early 1900s in the US to advocate for increased communication with children about reproductive health.