Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

Possums is a 174-page book consisting of a series of essays written about the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), the only living marsupial in the US. The essays were written by Carl Gottfried Hartman, an embryologist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington (CIW), in Baltimore, Maryland, who also worked with another mammal, the rhesus monkey. Possums was published in 1952 by Hartman's alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin (UT). Beginning in 1913, while as a graduate student, and later as an instructor at UT, Hartman captured and raised opossums. He was one of the first zoologists to study the intricacies of opossum embryology, leading to an account of the embryology and reproductive physiology of a mammal from the wild, rather than of a mammal bred exclusively for laboratory research. Possums culminated Hartman's studies of the marsupial.

Gustav Jacob Born was an experimental embryologist whose original work with amphibians served as the platform for his wax-plate method of embryo modeling, heteroblastic (different tissues) and xenoplastic (similar species) transplantation methods, environmental influences on sex ratio studies, and proposed function of the corpus luteum. He was born 22 April 1851 in Kempen, Prussia, but his family moved to the larger city of Görlitz within a year after Born's birth. His father was Marcus Born, a physician and public health officer who practiced in the town of Görlitz. Born began his formal education at the Gymnasium in Görlitz and later attended the universities of Breslau, Bonn, Strassburg, and Berlin. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Born enlisted and served as an orderly and physician's assistant. He returned to the University of Breslau at war's end and graduated with a MD in 1874. In 1877 Born became a Privatdozent at the University of Breslau. In 1886 he was made assistant professor and in 1898 he became professor of histology and comparative anatomy. During his tenure at Breslau, Born worked with Karl Hasse and reported being under constant scrutiny by Hasse who held widely known anti-semitic views.