Abstract
THE technical difficulties of experiments on embryos removed from the uterus are only very slowly being overcome. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Brachet showed that the rabbit egg could be kept alive and developing for a short time in tissue culture, and slightly, but only slightly, better results have been obtained by later workers. Another method is to transplant the egg obtained from one animal into a new mother. The experiment was first successfully performed by Heape in 1890; he transferred the segmenting eggs ofan Angora rabbit into the uterus of a Belgian hare, and gota normal development of Angora young. The transplantations can only be carried out with very young eggs, but there aremany problems relating to the early stages of development which might be investigated in this way, and in recent yearsthe method has been taken up again and several interesting results have been obtained. Thus Nicholas and Hall have been able to follow the development of isolated rat blastomeres into complete embryos, although they could not maintain the development for the full period of pregnancy.
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Experiments on Mammalian Embryos. Nature 137, 693 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137693b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137693b0