Hamburger received his early training at the University of Freiburg with the acclaimed experimental embryologist Hans Spemann. In 1932 Hamburger, then an assistant professor at Freiburg, travelled to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to work with the embryologist Frank Lillie at the University of Chicago. He brought the method of manipulating embryonic tissues with fine glass needles — which Spemann developed to transplant tissues into salamander embryos — and applied them to the chick embryo. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hamburger was relieved of his position in Freiburg, forcing him to remain in the United States, first at Chicago and then at Washington University in St Louis. Thus began a new era in which the chick embryo reigned supreme as the animal model for experimental embryology.
The chick had many advantages over amphibians, commonly used as animal models at the time, such as the possibility of observing embryonic development through a window cut in the egg shell. Adoption of the chick embryo by experimental embryologists was aided greatly by an article published by Hamburger and Howard Hamilton in 1951, entitled “A series of normal stages in the development of the chick embryo” (Journal of Morphology), which allowed the ages of embryos to be gauged by their morphology at different times after fertilization. This allowed data from different laboratories to be compared.
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