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Very Short Introductions #280
Developmental Biology: A Very Short Introduction
From a single cell--a fertilized egg--comes an elephant, a fly, or a human. How does this astonishing feat happen? How does the egg "know" what to become? How does it divide into the different cells, the separate tissues, the brain, the fingernail--every tiniest detail of the growing fetus? In this Very Short Introduction , renowned scientist Lewis Wolpert shows how the field of developmental biology seeks to answer these profound questions. A distinguished developmental biologist himself, Wolpert offers a concise and highly readable account of what we now know about development, discussing the first vital steps of growth, the patterning created by Hox genes and the development of form, embryonic stem cells, the timing of gene expression and its management, chemical signaling, and growth. Drawing on scientific breakthroughs in genetics, evolution, and molecular biology, he illuminates processes that are deeply rooted in evolutionary history, revealing how information is held in
genes whose vital timing in switching on and off is orchestrated by a host of proteins expressed by other genes.
genes whose vital timing in switching on and off is orchestrated by a host of proteins expressed by other genes.
160 pages, Paperback
First published September 28, 1999
32 people are currently reading
614 people want to read
About the author
Lewis Wolpert
35 books107 followersLewis Wolpert CBE FRS FRSL (born October 19, 1929) is a developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster.
Career
He was educated at the University of Witwatersrand, Imperial College London, and at King's College London. He is presently Emeritus Professor of Biology as applied to Medicine in the Department of Anatomy and developmental biology at University College London.
He is well known in his field for elaborating and championing the ideas of positional information and positional value: molecular signals and internal cellular responses to them that enable cells to do the right thing in the right place during embryonic development. The essence of these concepts is that there is a dedicated set of molecules for spatial coordination of cells that is the same across many species and across different developmental stages and tissues. The discovery of Hox gene codes in flies and vertebrates has largely vindicated Wolpert's positional value concept, while identification of growth factor morphogens in many species has supported the concept of positional information.
In addition to his scientific and research publications, he has written about his own experience of clinical depression in Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression. This was turned into three television programmes entitled 'A Living Hell' which he presented on BBC2.
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980 and awarded the CBE in 1990. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
He is a Vice-President of the British Humanist Association.
Theories
Wolpert is regarded as a rationalist. In an April 7, 2005 article entitled "Spiked", The Guardian asked a series of scientists "What is the one thing everyone should learn about science?" Wolpert responded, "I would teach the world that science is the best way to understand the world, and that for any set of observations, there is only one correct explanation. Also, science is value-free, as it explains the world as it is. Ethical issues arise only when science is applied to technology – from medicine to industry."
In a lecture entitled "Is Science Dangerous?", he expanded on this: "I regard it as ethically unacceptable and impractical to censor any aspect of trying to understand the nature of our world."
On May 25, 1994, Wolpert conducted an hour-long interview with Dr. Francis Crick called "How the Brain 'sees' " for The Times Dillon Science Forum; a video of the interview was produced by Just Results Video Productions for The Times.
On January 15, 2004, Wolpert and biologist/ parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake engaged in a live debate regarding the evidence for telepathy. It took place at the Royal Society of Arts in London.
In the late 1960s Wolpert proposed the illustrative French flag model, which explains how signalling between cells early in morphogenesis could be used to inform cells with the same Genetic regulatory network of their position and role.
He is credited with the famous quote: "It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life."
An early book was The Unnatural Nature of Science. His most recent book is Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
In May 2008, he gave one of four plenary lectures at the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology in Sigtuna, Sweden. His talk was reported as follows:
Lewis Wolpert's plenary address entitled "The Origins of Science and Religion" was provocative, amusing and from a totally materialist perspective. In his view, religion arose from the uniquely human need for causal explanations, and neither religion nor philosophy contributed anything of importance to scientific undersanding. ... ESSSAT is to be congratulated for offering its platform to a strong-minded materialist, but in the end Wolpert proved unable to enter serious debate with the conference theme or its participants.
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Career
He was educated at the University of Witwatersrand, Imperial College London, and at King's College London. He is presently Emeritus Professor of Biology as applied to Medicine in the Department of Anatomy and developmental biology at University College London.
He is well known in his field for elaborating and championing the ideas of positional information and positional value: molecular signals and internal cellular responses to them that enable cells to do the right thing in the right place during embryonic development. The essence of these concepts is that there is a dedicated set of molecules for spatial coordination of cells that is the same across many species and across different developmental stages and tissues. The discovery of Hox gene codes in flies and vertebrates has largely vindicated Wolpert's positional value concept, while identification of growth factor morphogens in many species has supported the concept of positional information.
In addition to his scientific and research publications, he has written about his own experience of clinical depression in Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression. This was turned into three television programmes entitled 'A Living Hell' which he presented on BBC2.
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980 and awarded the CBE in 1990. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
He is a Vice-President of the British Humanist Association.
Theories
Wolpert is regarded as a rationalist. In an April 7, 2005 article entitled "Spiked", The Guardian asked a series of scientists "What is the one thing everyone should learn about science?" Wolpert responded, "I would teach the world that science is the best way to understand the world, and that for any set of observations, there is only one correct explanation. Also, science is value-free, as it explains the world as it is. Ethical issues arise only when science is applied to technology – from medicine to industry."
In a lecture entitled "Is Science Dangerous?", he expanded on this: "I regard it as ethically unacceptable and impractical to censor any aspect of trying to understand the nature of our world."
On May 25, 1994, Wolpert conducted an hour-long interview with Dr. Francis Crick called "How the Brain 'sees' " for The Times Dillon Science Forum; a video of the interview was produced by Just Results Video Productions for The Times.
On January 15, 2004, Wolpert and biologist/ parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake engaged in a live debate regarding the evidence for telepathy. It took place at the Royal Society of Arts in London.
In the late 1960s Wolpert proposed the illustrative French flag model, which explains how signalling between cells early in morphogenesis could be used to inform cells with the same Genetic regulatory network of their position and role.
He is credited with the famous quote: "It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life."
An early book was The Unnatural Nature of Science. His most recent book is Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
In May 2008, he gave one of four plenary lectures at the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology in Sigtuna, Sweden. His talk was reported as follows:
Lewis Wolpert's plenary address entitled "The Origins of Science and Religion" was provocative, amusing and from a totally materialist perspective. In his view, religion arose from the uniquely human need for causal explanations, and neither religion nor philosophy contributed anything of importance to scientific undersanding. ... ESSSAT is to be congratulated for offering its platform to a strong-minded materialist, but in the end Wolpert proved unable to enter serious debate with the conference theme or its participants.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 23, 2023
الكتاب أحيانا ممل ككتاب الوزارة للصف الأول الثانوى فى أى مادة علمية و أحيانا ممتع كسلسلة رجل المستحيل لمراهق أدمن القراءة.
ربما حسب معرفتك العلمية المسبقة و قراءاتك فى نفس الموضوع قبل هذا الكتاب و هو قصور شديد يفقد الكتاب ميزته فى انه مقدمة قصيرة جدا أعدت لغير المتخصصين.
لن تفهمه جيدا الا اذا كنت قد مررت من قبل بعدة محطات منها الخلية و التطور و النمو.
May 19, 2019
This book stands as take-home messages about developmental biology. It sums up the basic concepts (or conclusions) of the most important theories and experiments done in this field so far. I would scarcely assume that this very short introduction is for « non-specialists », though specialty in a field is a general terminology. I might rather suggest it for those newly introduced to it, like I was while taking my developmental biology course. It was a good first read of this valuable series that will have yet to-be-read books added.
November 22, 2022
Developmental Biology: A Very Short Introduction (2011) by Lewis Wolpert explores one of nature's deepest mysteries: how complex multicellular organisms build themselves from a single cell. I found the book readable enough, even though it unavoidably uses a lot of terms specific to the field. Readers with less background in chemistry and biology might wish to begin with other VSIs on those topics before reading this one. Or just read this one, absorb the confusion, read other chem/bio books, and then re-read this one.
Often we refer to complex organisms and structures (like the human brain) evolving over millions of years. While true in one sense, it wasn't so much one particular brain that evolved, but a whole series of individuals with different brains, with each one repeating a similar construction process beginning from a single fertilized egg (zygote). A zygote contains in its DNA a complete set of instructions (a development program) for building a complex organism (with some flexibility built in to allow for environmental buffeting). The enormous versatility of development programs makes them fundamental to evolution, providing a clear genetic mechanism for bridging gaps in the evolutionary tree. If we only consider adult organisms, it may be hard to see how you'd get from something like a fish to something like a frog, let alone from something like a yeast cell to Mozart. Such gaps appear far less daunting when we measure them in terms of a sequence of relatively minor tweaks to development programs. Then the main remaining challenge is to show that none of the tweaks in an evolutionary sequence produced a loss of fitness, substantial enough to have killed off every individual in a species before any of them could give rise to individuals with the next tweak.
Developmental biology also offers insight into what can go wrong in the process on the individual level. Developmental program defects give rise to a vast array of human diseases. Every individual's program is slightly different, and some of these differences cause serious problems. Environmental insults can interfere with development also, leading to outcomes such as the Thalidomide scandal.
Wolpert mentions that in his view, the fact that an early human embryo can undergo twinning means that we can't regard the embryo in this stage as yet being a distinct person. Wolpert doesn't mention that nobody would imagine human personhood begins so early if the Church hadn't quietly changed its previous infallible doctrine after the discovery of the microscope! Traditionally the Church taught that life begins at the quickening, when the mother first begins to feel the fetus move. (From Stem Cells: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Slack.)
Each of us begins as a single cell that runs a "program" which is to say each of us begins life as a machine. Gradually this machine rather robotically builds up enough complexity to think of itself as something more than a machine. That is, the machine becomes complex enough to start having an ego. And then some of those machines want to retroactively declare that they were never machines, but always persons right from the start. Science is humbling, hence the ongoing popularity of religions to maintain the needed safe spaces for human ego.
In other chapters Wolpert explores the relation between development and the later fate of the organism, including unpleasantries such as ageing, cancer, loss of body parts or organ function, and death. Understanding development could lead to technologies for repairing a variety of damages that we are helpless to address now, such as spinal cord lesions and limb amputations. The ability to grow replacement organs genetically matched to a patient would solve the problems of organ rejection and donor shortage. Currently we can only replace some of our damaged organs if a generous person dies, and then the recipient needs to take drugs to suppress his or her immune system, creating vulnerability to infections (not the best thing in a pandemic). Having the ability to regrow organs from a patient's own stem cells would be nice.
Wolpert closes with a hint at the deep insight developmental biology might lead to:
Although Wolpert doesn't mention it specifically here, this reliable computation will not only reveal just what the adult would be, but also approximately how it would behave. While our genes don't determine our behaviors to a precise degree, they do give each of us strong dispositions toward particular behaviors in particular environments. Given that our dispositions produce a variety of good and bad outcomes, for ourselves and for other people, species, and entire ecosystems that we affect, identifying every factor that influences human behavior is fundamental to building better lives for individuals and better societies for everyone. And given that human behavior is steadily degrading Earth's habitable climate, understanding why we do what we do is fundamental to whether we survive as a species at all.
Often we refer to complex organisms and structures (like the human brain) evolving over millions of years. While true in one sense, it wasn't so much one particular brain that evolved, but a whole series of individuals with different brains, with each one repeating a similar construction process beginning from a single fertilized egg (zygote). A zygote contains in its DNA a complete set of instructions (a development program) for building a complex organism (with some flexibility built in to allow for environmental buffeting). The enormous versatility of development programs makes them fundamental to evolution, providing a clear genetic mechanism for bridging gaps in the evolutionary tree. If we only consider adult organisms, it may be hard to see how you'd get from something like a fish to something like a frog, let alone from something like a yeast cell to Mozart. Such gaps appear far less daunting when we measure them in terms of a sequence of relatively minor tweaks to development programs. Then the main remaining challenge is to show that none of the tweaks in an evolutionary sequence produced a loss of fitness, substantial enough to have killed off every individual in a species before any of them could give rise to individuals with the next tweak.
Developmental biology also offers insight into what can go wrong in the process on the individual level. Developmental program defects give rise to a vast array of human diseases. Every individual's program is slightly different, and some of these differences cause serious problems. Environmental insults can interfere with development also, leading to outcomes such as the Thalidomide scandal.
Wolpert mentions that in his view, the fact that an early human embryo can undergo twinning means that we can't regard the embryo in this stage as yet being a distinct person. Wolpert doesn't mention that nobody would imagine human personhood begins so early if the Church hadn't quietly changed its previous infallible doctrine after the discovery of the microscope! Traditionally the Church taught that life begins at the quickening, when the mother first begins to feel the fetus move. (From Stem Cells: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Slack.)
Each of us begins as a single cell that runs a "program" which is to say each of us begins life as a machine. Gradually this machine rather robotically builds up enough complexity to think of itself as something more than a machine. That is, the machine becomes complex enough to start having an ego. And then some of those machines want to retroactively declare that they were never machines, but always persons right from the start. Science is humbling, hence the ongoing popularity of religions to maintain the needed safe spaces for human ego.
In other chapters Wolpert explores the relation between development and the later fate of the organism, including unpleasantries such as ageing, cancer, loss of body parts or organ function, and death. Understanding development could lead to technologies for repairing a variety of damages that we are helpless to address now, such as spinal cord lesions and limb amputations. The ability to grow replacement organs genetically matched to a patient would solve the problems of organ rejection and donor shortage. Currently we can only replace some of our damaged organs if a generous person dies, and then the recipient needs to take drugs to suppress his or her immune system, creating vulnerability to infections (not the best thing in a pandemic). Having the ability to regrow organs from a patient's own stem cells would be nice.
Wolpert closes with a hint at the deep insight developmental biology might lead to:
"It is likely that in the next 50 years, given the genes and structure of a fertilized egg, it will be possible to reliably compute the details of that organism’s development and just what the adult would be."
Although Wolpert doesn't mention it specifically here, this reliable computation will not only reveal just what the adult would be, but also approximately how it would behave. While our genes don't determine our behaviors to a precise degree, they do give each of us strong dispositions toward particular behaviors in particular environments. Given that our dispositions produce a variety of good and bad outcomes, for ourselves and for other people, species, and entire ecosystems that we affect, identifying every factor that influences human behavior is fundamental to building better lives for individuals and better societies for everyone. And given that human behavior is steadily degrading Earth's habitable climate, understanding why we do what we do is fundamental to whether we survive as a species at all.
February 22, 2014
This book stands as an example of how to write a "Very Short Introduction". It starts with basic concepts, builds on them, and then continues on to pack as much information as can fit in 140+ pages.
The book vividly describes mechanisms and processes at work in developing embryos. Until I read it, I was not fully able to visualize gastrulation and neurulation, the first major patterning events in the development of all chordate animals. Plants are also covered, but less material is devoted to them than is to animals.
Lewis Wolpert writes for the uninitiated, but never talks down to the reader. The author relies on the memory and enthusiasm of the reader in the belief that he does not have to repeat himself.
The only drawback to the book's presentation is that the step-by-step formation of a multicellular animal has to be inferred; the book is organised by topic rather than as a linear progression of development.
The book vividly describes mechanisms and processes at work in developing embryos. Until I read it, I was not fully able to visualize gastrulation and neurulation, the first major patterning events in the development of all chordate animals. Plants are also covered, but less material is devoted to them than is to animals.
Lewis Wolpert writes for the uninitiated, but never talks down to the reader. The author relies on the memory and enthusiasm of the reader in the belief that he does not have to repeat himself.
The only drawback to the book's presentation is that the step-by-step formation of a multicellular animal has to be inferred; the book is organised by topic rather than as a linear progression of development.
August 6, 2012
It is a very concise reminder of the essentials of DevBio, but I'm afraid it is way too hard for anyone who is not familiar with the concepts in the book. It is definitely not an introductory book.
March 16, 2023
my favourite very short introduction so far
July 10, 2017
Another good read about biology. I really enjoyed how this one focused mostly on embryonic development, although I found when it came to the chapter of evolution, I was already pretty familiar with its content. The information that I found most interesting was that about stem cells and aging. There are two types of stem cells; ES cells (embryonic stem cells) and iPS cell (induced pluripotent stem cells). iPS cells are found in the gut and on the skin, as this tissue needs to be constant replaced. There have been an increasing amount of studies with iPS cells since there seems to be ethical issues with using ES cells, despite these being harvested when an embryo could still split and turn into twins (telling scientists it should not be classified as human life). Aging is also very odd. For some reason only somatic cells can only replicate so many times, which is what leads to aging. Some scientists believe this is because all evolution cares about is an organism living long enough to pass along its DNA. Lewis got a bit technical at times, but overall it was pretty easy to follow.
May 24, 2017
Somewhat straightforward and factual introduction to Developmental Biology. None of the broad ideas or inspiring tone of some of the better VSI series. Probably better as a reminder of what you've learned from a more detailed book than as a starter text.
November 25, 2019
A good summary of the subject
I like these summaries of various different subjects. It gives you a good overview of what you want to know and you can always decide if you want to dig deeper.
I like these summaries of various different subjects. It gives you a good overview of what you want to know and you can always decide if you want to dig deeper.
June 5, 2018
An excellent introduction to the field of developmental biology.
August 4, 2022
This was quite interesting. Although I will probably not remember most of the content, this was helpful to get an idea of what developmental biology is all about.
December 22, 2022
كتاب جيد، لكن يلزمه معرفة مسبقة بالاحياء وطبيعة الجسم والخلايا
February 23, 2017
يميل للأكاديمية أكثر من أنهريكون كتاب "مقدمات". لكنه جميل للي عنده خلفية عن الموضوع, راح يوسع مداركك. هل فكرت كيف الخلايا تفكر بتحويل بويضة ملقحة إلى فيل كامل بكل تفاصيله المعقدة وسبب وجود الساقين في مكان و الخرطوم بدون أخطاء? هذا الكتاب راح يفيدك.
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August 21, 2016كتاب له فكرة جديدة بالنسبة لي بالرغم من قراءاتي المتعدده في علم الأحياء والميكروبيولوجي حيث أنه يركز على العمليات الحيوية التي تصاحب نمو الخلايا والأعضاء والكائنات بصورة دقيقة وذلك في الحيوانات الفقارية واللافقارية والنبات والمقارنة بينهم كما يتعرض لبعض الأخطاء أثناء النمو التي تؤدي للطفرات وللأورام مثل السرطانات كما يتعرض للخلايا المسؤولة عن النمو وعن الخلايا الجذعية . ويحاول الإجابة عن سؤال متى ولماذا تموت الخلايا ولماذا تهرم الكائنات وخصوصا أن بعض الكائنات تهرم أسرع من الأخرى . موضوع الكتاب جميل و فتح الباب لقراءات أخرى متخصصة في نفس المجال
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews