Animal Anomalies – aiming to popularise developmental biology
Posted by Lewis Held, on 9 March 2022
In a recent ‘Call to Arms’ essay (2019 Dev. Cell; 50:132) John Wallingford, plenary speaker for the BSDB/BSCB Joint Spring Meeting 2022, urged us to “tell [our] stories” at this exciting time for our field. As one (among many) evangelists, I penned a monograph about weird animals called ‘Animal Anomalies’ for Cambridge University Press. The etiologies of their sundry abnormalities reveal how normal pathways get misrouted by mutations. For example, Siamese cats cross their eyes after pigment defects deflect retinal axons, and frog eggs give rise to Siamese twins after artificial egg rotation establishes a secondary organizer. With the conference coming up, I wanted to thank John and offer this book for others who wish to popularise developmental biology at a time when the public is sorely lacking in their grasp of science in general. Readers of the Node can get 20% off with the link www.cambridge.org/9781108819749 and enter the discount code ‘ANOMALIES’.
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