Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

During the 1870s and early 1880s, the British morphologist Francis Maitland Balfour contributed in important ways to the budding field of evolutionary embryology, especially through his comparative embryological approach to uncovering ancestral relationships between groups. As developmental biologist and historian Brian Hall has observed, the field of evolutionary embryology in the nineteenth century was the historical ancestor of modern-day evolutionary developmental biology. Balfour's work was notably inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Ernst Haeckel's account of the relationships between embryology and evolution. Only a decade after Balfour's program of research began, an alpine climbing accident robbed Britain of its most promising embryologist.

Edward Stuart Russell was born 23 March 1887 to Helen Cockburn Young and the Reverend John N. Russell in Port Glasgow, Scotland. Friends and co-workers alike knew Russell as a quiet and focused, though always kind and helpful person. Trained in classics and biology, Russell's interests drew him to the study of historical and philosophical issues in the biological sciences, particularly morphology and animal behavior. According to Nils Roll-Hansen, Russell was one of the most influential philosophers of biology in the second third of the twentieth century. It was through history and philosophy, rather than his equally important work as a fisheries biologist, Russell argued that developmental and embryological studies deserve a central role in the biological sciences.

Known by many for his wide-reaching interests and keen thinking, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was one of Britain's leading scientific academics in the first few decades of the twentieth century. A prodigious author, Thompson published some 300 papers, books, and articles in the biological sciences, classics, oceanography, and mathematics. He was a famous lecturer and conversationalist-a true "scholar-naturalist," as his daughter wrote in her biography of her father. Of his numerous publications, the acclaimed On Growth and Form (1917, 1945) is generally considered to be his most influential. Many highly respected biologists-like John Tyler Bonner, Joseph Woodger, Sir Peter Medawar, and Stephen Jay Gould-have argued for the importance of On Growth and Form for the history of twentieth century biology. In this work Thompson integrates a causal understanding of biological growth and structure with the mathematics of physical laws. Many developmental biologists have drawn inspiration from reading Thompson's magnum opus, by focusing on this approach to understanding the physical limitations and mathematical processes of developmental growth and morphological form.