Abstract
A RECENT issue of Giba Symposia, a journal produced by a pharmaceutical firm, contains two informative articles on monstrosities in embryological development. The first, by Dr. Hamburger, professor of zoology in Washington University, St. Louis, is a general account of natural and experimentally induced maldevelopments. The second, by Dr. Wolfgang Born, of the Department of Fine Arts of Louisiana State University, traces the course of monstrosities, real and imaginary, as they appear in painting, sculpture and mythology. It is interesting that Dr. Born is a son of the Gustav Born who was one of the founders of experimental embryology, and one of whose main discoveries was that two halves of a divided amphibian embryo will fuse together if they are kept in apposition. It is widely believed that this finding was one of those brilliant outcomes of an accidental observation. In the course of Born‘s studies on regeneration, some tadpoles were halved just after hatching. To enable him to distinguish individual larvae on which he was working, he left a part of the skin of the back intact after having halved the bodies. To his surprise he found next day that the halved larval bodies the dorsal skin of which had been left intact had re-united and healed together.
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Embryology of Monsters. Nature 161, 88–89 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161088d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161088d0