Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

George Richard Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions in Wichita, Kansas, was shot to death on 31 May 2009 by Scott Roeder. As the director of one of only a small number of clinics in the US that performed legal late-term abortions, Tiller was a target for anti-abortion activists. Though Tiller lived and worked in Kansas, his work agitated anti-abortion groups and fueled the controversy surrounding abortion at a national level. Tiller's life and death fueled the abortion debate in the US.

In Australia in the 1940s, Norman McAlister Gregg observed a connection between pregnant women who contracted the rubella virus, or German measles, and cataract formation in their children's eyes. Gregg published his findings in the 1941 article Congenital Cataract following German Measles in the Mother in Transactions of the Ophthalmological Society of Australia. In the article, Gregg analyzed seventy-eight cases of congenital cataracts and suggested that the mothers' environmental factors could cause birth defects, otherwise known as teratogenic effects. Gregg's paper on the teratogenic effects of an environmental agent, the rubella virus, changed the study of birth defects to include viruses as potential causes or teratogens.

Gunther von Hagens invented a plastination technique and created Body Worlds, a traveling exhibit that has made anatomy part of the public domain. Von Hagens invented the plastination technique in 1977 while working at Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, Germany. Von Hagen's plastination technique preserves real bodies and tissues by the removal of the fluid and replacement with resin. Body Worlds features three-dimensional, plastinated human bodies. As of 2012, the exhibition has given greater than 32 million people worldwide the opportunity to peer inside the human body, something previously available mostly to those in the medical field. Von Hagens and Body Worlds have educated the public and professionals by displaying diseased and healthy specimens. They have contributed to embryology through its displays of human pregnancy, embryos, and fetuses.

In 1928 Ezra Seymour Gosney founded the non-profit Human Betterment Foundation (HBF) in Pasadena, California to support the research and publication of the personal and social effects of eugenic sterilizations carried out in California. Led by director Gosney and secretary Paul Popenoe, the HBF collected data on thousands of individuals in California who had been involuntarily sterilized under a California state law enacted in 1909. The Foundation's assets were liquidated following Gosney's death in 1942. In 1943, Gosney's daughter donated the remaining assets to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California to establish the Gosney research fund for biological research. Between 1928 and 1942, the HBF published extensively on what they believed to be the benefits of sterilization to both patient and society. The HBF and its members existed within the larger context of the American eugenics movement and scientific institutions, including the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, which bolstered the movement's goals of the control of human reproduction and human heredity. Moreover, the model sterilization legislation written by the HBF was disseminated throughout the world to eugenics enthusiasts eager to pass laws limiting the reproduction of people they considered to be unfit.

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.

Fetal surgeries are a range of medical interventions performed in utero on the developing fetus of a pregnant woman to treat a number of congenital abnormalities. The first documented fetal surgical procedure occurred in 1963 in Auckland, New Zealand when A. William Liley treated fetal hemolytic anemia, or Rh disease, with a blood transfusion. Three surgical techniques comprise many fetal surgeries: hysterotomy, or open abdominal surgery performed on the woman; fetoscopy, for which doctors use a fiber-optic endoscope to view and make repairs to abnormalities in the fetus; and percutaneous fetal theray, for which doctors use a catheter to drain excess fluid. As the sophistication of surgical and neonatal technology advanced in the late twentieth century, so too did the number of congenital disorders fetal surgeons treated, such as mylomeningeocele, blocked urinary tracts, twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, polyhydramnios, diaphragmatic hernia, tracheal occlusion, and other anomalies. Many discuss the ethics of fetal surgery, as many consider it contentious, as fetal surgery risks both the developing fetus and the pregnant woman, and at times it only marginally improves patient outcomes. Some argue, however, that as more advanced diagnostic equipment and surgical methods improve, advanced clinical trials in a few conditions may demonstrate more benefits than risks to both pregnant women and fetuses.

In 2010, a team of US researchers concluded that the more peanuts a pregnant woman ate during her pregnancy, the more likely her newborn was to be sensitive to peanuts. They published their results in 2010's "Maternal consumption of peanut during pregnancy is associated with peanut sensitization in atopic infants." The work resulted from the collaboration of Scott Sicherer and Hugh Sampson, both from the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York, New York along with other colleagues. The experiment identified prenatal and postnatal factors associated with peanut sensitization, which was identified and measured by the blood plasma levels of a specific class of antibody, immunoglobulin (IgE), in infants. The researchers concluded that there was a direct correlation between maternal intake of peanut during pregnancy and a high level of peanut sensitization in the infant after birth.

Edmund Beecher Wilson contributed to cell biology, the study of cells, in the US during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. His three editions of The Cell in Development and Inheritance (or Heredity) in 1896, 1900, and 1925 introduced generations of students to cell biology. In The Cell, Wilson described the evidence and theories of his time about cells and identified topics for future study. He helped show how each part of the cell works during cell division and in every step of early development of an organism. Developmental biologists trained in the mid-twentieth century reported WilsonÕs text as their foundation for understanding biology, including about how cells, development, heredity, and evolution interact. Wilson considered cells as the center of all biological phenomena.

Frederik Ruysch's cabinet of curiosities, commonly referred to simply as the Cabinet, was a museum Ruysch created in the Netherlands in the late 160ss. The Cabinet filled a series of small houses that Ruysch rented in Amsterdam and contained over 2,000 specimens, including preserved fetuses and infants. The collection remained in Amsterdam until it was purchased by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia in 1717 and transferred to St. Petersburg, Russia. Similar to Gunther von Hagens' twenty-first century Body Worlds exhibition, which presents bodies preserved through plastination, the Cabinet was open to both medical professionals and laypeople. The pieces in the Cabinet were life-like and aesthetically pleasing, making them valuable education tools for prenatal and infant anatomy as well as an effective way of garnering public interest in anatomy.