Abstract
THE Nobel Prize for Medicine for 1935 has been awarded to Prof. Hans Spemann, professor of zoology in the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. The presentation is a fitting recognition of a series of investigations which have transferred a large group of phenomena from the domain of metaphysics to that of science, in a way which we are more used to associate with the eighteenth century than with our own. Since his earliest papers, written at the turn of the century, Spemann has devoted himself to the problem of why one part of an egg develops into a certain organ in the adult, another part into something else. When he began his investigations, there was no scientific answer to such questions; one had the choice of invoking, with Driesch, a non-material entelechy, or of putting one's trust, with Roux, in the physics and chemistry of the future. Spemann refused such theoretical flights. He restricted his speculation to the actual data he could obtain from experiment, and his experimentation again to an intensive study of the development of one group of animals, the Amphibia. After twenty years of research, remarkable alike for the clarity with which the problems were envisaged and the beauty and skill of the technical means by which they were attacked, he was able to demonstrate that, in the amphibian egg, the way in which any part develops is dependent on its position relative to a certain region which he named the organisation centre. The formulation of this concept provided the first step in the causal analysis of the differentiation of the several regions of the egg. But Spemann was not content to leave the organisation centre as an unanalysed biological entity. He proceeded to show that some, at least, of its effects are due to its chemical properties, the nature of which he is still actively investigating, in company with his pupils and many others who have followed him in the exploration of the rich country which he has opened up for science.
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Prof. Hans Spemann. Nature 136, 711 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136711a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136711a0