felinejumper | [dev bio] edmund b. wilson (Reply)

So: I have this RL history of developmental biology project that I have been exceedingly bad at doing, even though I keep claiming to really care deeply about it; part of my issue is that the research is extremely daunting in a field that I am technically familiar with but not historically so. It's basically developmental biology at the turn of the century through the present day (I say, blithefully, pretending as if > one hundred years of scientific and political history will be totally easy and trivial to learn and then pick apart for societal trends that project into the future as well hmmm).

I am telling myself that I do better when I'm parsing things for an imagined audience (i.e. to learn something teach it to someone else), so, some (exceedingly lightweight) notes on Edmund Beecher Wilson, American father of developmental biology!

Field wise, "developmental biology" derives from research on cytology (cell structure and function) and embryology (a descriptive "how does this embryo look?") thing, a large part of which happened in Germany circa 1870 ¹. The rediscovery of Mendel's papers in 1900 + higher-res microscopy led to the chromosome theory of inheritance in the period of 1900-1910 (albeit presaged by the theories in the decade before), and the combination of those fields, wherein cytology explained embryology, plus the development of mechanistic theories i.e. genetics led to the rise of developmental biology as a combined effort in the early years of the twentieth century. It fell out of vogue in the 20s (seemingly because people got invested in applied science vs. blue skies exploratory work, I'm not sure?) until the 1930s, and then out of favor (WWII, maybe? Focus on different/less funding?) until the 1950s and (I'm guessing) post-war funding, where the discovery of growth factors + patterning, in addition to genetics proper, would have been a infusion of fresh intellectual blood. Then it went away again as a field of major interest, and now here we are AGAIN in recent years with synthetic biology + new tools applied to old fields. Or at least, that's my extremely hazy understanding of things.

In the U.S., the oft-cited originator is Edmund B. Wilson. His brief educational timeline:

1878: graduated Yale, background in biology
1878-81: graduate work at Hopkins, 1878-81 in embryology (genetics not yet existing! & this is pre- well established physical inheritance theories, or at least pre-rediscovery of Mendel)
1885-1891: Professor at Bryn Mawr; traveled to Europe as a research scientist with Theodor Boveri, among others, and likely spent time with Hans Driesch, Wilhelm Roux, and probably Hans Spemann. His time at Bryn Mawr set the stage for his long term link to Thomas Hunt Morgan & Morgan's Bryn Mawr student Nettie Maria Stevens
1891 - 1928 (37 years!!!): Columbia University professor in biology and zoology

Some assorted publication notes from when his career had been more properly established:

1896: publication of the first edition of The Cell in Development and Inheritance (short summary, full edition); notable because this is pre rediscovery of Mendel's paper, but does nonetheless argue for physical inheritance via chromatin (reference)
1900: Second edition published
1902: Sutton, one of Wilson's students, (somewhat inaccurately) claims to have determined the physical basis for Mendelian inheritance. Correct in the general, but ID'ed the wrong stage of cell division. (discussion here); but also in the general, this was also the opinions of T.H. Morgan in the same time period, and Wilson from 1896. So the usual thing where no one paper is The Paper.³
1905: Wilson & Nettie Maria Stevens independently publish about sex determination via chromosomes; they cite each other & Wilson reviews Stevens' paper, which warms my little feminist heart AND raises some interesting questions about, idk, women in science.² AND there's an interesting thread about the debate between Morgan and Wilson; people read Morgan as having been fairly invested in the cytoplasm as the source of inheritance, but supported Stevens in her research on chromosomes/the nucleus? I'm fuzzy on this, having not read the actual papers from 1906 yet.
1925: third edition published, which ran to 1232 pages, and was still in use after World War II (this cribbed from Wikipedia, but seems consistent with some other write ups.)

I am skipping a...lot of publications, because it's a goddamn internet blog and the important thing was to get started.

An aside: if you follow the link to the full book, they highlight this selection from his final chapter, which is somewhat funny/grim because we wrote this exact thing in a 2018 paper, more or less:

That a cell can carry with it the sum total of the heritage of the species, that it can in the course of a few days or weeks give rise to a mollusk or a man, is the greatest marvel of biological science. In attempting to analyze the problems that it involves, we must from the outset hold fast to the fact, on which Huxley insisted, that the wonderful formative energy of the‘ germ is not impressed upon it from without, but is inherent in the egg as a heritage from the parental life of which it was originally a part…What gives development its marvellous character is the rapidity with which it proceeds and the diversity of the results attained in a span so brief.

But when we have grasped this cardinal fact, we have but focussed our instruments for a study of the real problem. How do the adult characteristics lie latent in the germ-cell; and how do they become patent as development proceeds? This is the final question that looms in the background of every investigation of the cell. In approaching it we may well make a frank confession of ignorance; for in spite of all that the microscope has revealed, we have not yet penetrated the mystery, and inheritance and development still remain in their fundamental aspects as great a riddle as they were to the Greeks.

I think what I want to follow up on a little more closely in future research benders is the very fraught relationship between evolutionary biology & genetics, in addition to tracking down some of the less American members of the Boveri gang. You'd think they'd be tight partners, but in fact there's been, you know, ongoing debates between evolutionary biologists and geneticists for, literally, a hundred years. It's a weird demonstration of silo-ization and specialization ~~or just dick measuring but~~: like, for my paper, we were very much synthetic biologists working our way into developmental biology, and my post-doc was like "ok, gotta learn a whole new field now" EVEN THOUGH genetics very much originated in developmental biology. Reference for that here as well. We also had to add, you know, some specific experiments that were directly applicable to devbio after revisions.

I clearly need to do this with a lot of index cards and a giant corkboard to map geographical/time/knowledge relationships, but this was in fact exceedingly helpful as a starting point.

1:This, non-trivially, overlaps with Germany's kinda...formation as a state, and the scientific period as closely tied to the colonial period of Germany, as discussed in the Hirschfeld book and also more generally in Arendt. I am not sure why America and Germany were so tightly tied; what was up in England and France at the time? They also had strong colonial projects and strong science teams, but just do not seem to be showing up nearly as much.

2: note to self to read these; and check to see if the ~~Emily Martin~~ Richardson piece on sexing the X references them directly? How did Stevens & Wilson frame gender/sex in their original publications? Get access to this 1978 article!

3: addn'l note to self to investigate paper dynamics; where & when else could I look for relevant publications/scientific communiques? Journals didn't fully establish until, mm, the war years? Check the Alex Csizar writing for a starting point