Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

Although educated as a scientist who studied with both August Weismann and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch was first employed as a professor of philosophy and became a strong proponent of vitalism. Driesch was born on 28 October 1867, the only child of Josefine Raudenkolb and Paul Driesch. He grew up in a wealthy merchant family in Hamburg, Germany, where he was educated at the humanistic Gymnasium Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums that had been founded by a friend of Martin Luther. In 1886 he spent two summers studying with Weismann at the University of Freiburg and then entered the University of Jena, where he received his doctorate in 1889 with a study of hydroid colonies. By 1890 Driesch had lost interest in Haeckel's popular phylogenetic approach to zoology and instead focused on experimental embryology.

Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on 2 February 1869, Charles Manning Child was the only surviving child of Mary Elizabeth and Charles Chauncey Child, a prosperous, old New England family. Growing up in Higganum, Connecticut, Child was interested in biology from an early age. He made extensive collections of plants and minerals on his family farm and went on to study biology at Wesleyan University, commuting from his family home. Child received his PhB in 1890 and MS in biology in 1892, and then went on to study in Leipzig after his parents death. He worked for a short time in the psychology laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt, and then pursued studies in zoology under the supervision of Rudolf Leuckhart. His doctoral dissertation investigated morphological aspects of insect sense organs. Leuckhart emphasized the functional purpose of morphological structures and led many of his students to develop and defend the notion of teleology, including Child, who completed his PhD in 1894.

The establishment and growth of developmental-evolutionary biology owes a great debt to the work of John Tyler Bonner. Bonner's studies of cellular slime molds have shed light on some of the big questions of biology including the origins of multicellularity and the nature of morphogenesis. The second child of Lilly Marguerite Stehli and Paul Bonner, John Tyler was born 12 May 1920 in New York City and spent his early years in Locust Valley, Long Island (late 1920s), France (1930), and London (1932). His love for science was ignited as a young boy in England where he was inspired by visits to St. James's Park and the Natural History Museum.

Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado is a Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine and is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, 24 February 1964, Sánchez Alvarado left his home to pursue education in the United States, where he received a Bachelor of Science in molecular biology and chemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1986 and a Doctorate in pharmacology and cell biophysics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1992. During his PhD studies Sánchez Alvarado examined the in vitro differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells. In 1994 he began a postdoctoral position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Embryology, where he was appointed a staff associate in 1995. In 2002 he became an Associate Professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, and was promoted to Professor in 2005.

Abraham Trembley's discovery of the remarkable regenerative capacity of the hydra caused many to question their beliefs about the generation of organisms. Born 3 September 1710 to a prominent Geneva family, Trembley studied at the Calvin Institute, now the University of Geneva, where he completed his thesis on calculus. He went on to become tutor for Count William Bentinck's two sons, and it was while teaching the boys natural history that Trembley came across a strange organism in a sample of pond water. This mysterious polyp, or hydra, had been previously described by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, as well as an anonymous English gentleman in 1704, but Trembley was unaware of the polyp's identity and began a series of experiments to determine whether it was an animal or a plant. His investigations were also motivated by his observation that the number of arms on different polyps varied, an irregularity uncommon in animals. Yet Trembley felt that it was an animal.