(or Navigating post-PhD turbulence in the midst of the pandemic)

Working in academic research was such a blast that I’d never imagined anything else for myself. After my Master’s degree in regenerative medicine, I worked at the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, India, for a few years before I came across a post on The Node advertising a terrific project in Dr. Christian Schröter’s lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology (MPI). I had a fantastic time working on my doctoral projects at Chris’ lab, and the years packed with long debates about robustness and heterogeneity, coupled with many wonderful lab outings (pre-pandemic, of course :’-[ ) simply flew by. Last year, after I handed in my thesis, I saw an ad for Mosa Meat, a start-up working on developing cultured meat and made what appeared to be a sudden decision to change my career trajectory; I decided to join them.

I’ve always been captivated by a common refrain in biology: the tension between the fidelity of information transmission required in a process and the stochastics-driven heterogeneity or noise at that operational scale. As my PhD on signalling and fate choices in mouse embryonic stem cells drew to a close, I had my eye out for other systems where I could continue to study different aspects of this tension between robustness and exploratory behaviour. At the same time, after the tumultuous events of recent years, the call-to-action for addressing the climate crisis and re-thinking modern supply chains had firmly lodged itself in my heart. I was craving an outlet for these energies.

My first exposure to cultured meat came from an unlikely source:  my partner’s father. He mentioned cellular agriculture in a conversation we had about changing the way we eat and for weeks after, the idea kept playing over and over again in my mind. When I saw Mosa Meat was hiring, I reached out to Joshua Flack, the scientist who’d placed the ad, in a cautious email peppered with tentative phrasing, to enquire a bit more about the role. Among the puzzles they were trying to solve, one stood out to me clearly – the question of how to robustly guide cells into certain fates and overcome the hydra of heterogeneity. After a set of interviews and a few chats with Josh and the other brilliant scientists at Mosa Meat, I was sold – here was a problem that promised to be both intellectually challenging and morally fulfilling.

Mosa Meat, as a food technology start-up, is packed to the gills with engineers and biologists at varying levels of experience, all of whom are simultaneously working at cracking different parts of this complex puzzle: how do we create cleaner and kinder meat? Working as a senior scientist in the Stemness and Isolation team, I’m trying to figure out the cell biology of bovine satellite and fibro-adipogenic progenitor cells in our bioreactors, how to guide them to retain their stemness and, later, to differentiate. What does this mean in practice? My daily life here looks a lot like it looked back in academia but with some differences. The similarities between the two are all the necessary verbiage of science: cell culture, banging your head against the wall trying to design an experiment that feels neat, imaging, flow cytometry, grabbing someone in the hall to have a quick chat about their recent results, and so on. The only practical difference is that instead of the small teams that academic environments foster, everyone here works as one big team that is fully invested in each others’ work. This means that in addition to discussions over Slack and email, plenty of in-person meetings are held to make sure everyone is  up-to-date on the most recent findings. It’s a bit of an unusual experience for me (and by no means one that’s unwanted!) to work in a team of over a hundred scientists and engineers who are all excited about your most recent experiment.

Satellite cells finding their way into a myofiber at Mosa Meat. Imaged on a Phasefocus Livecyte microscope

At a higher level of abstraction, there are more differences between my work at the MPI and the work I’m doing here at Mosa Meat. For me personally, the work I did at the MPI was very focused on pushing advances in conceptual frameworks, whereas the focus here is more on leveraging conceptual advances to develop robustness in method. I certainly don’t mean to paint these differences as a dichotomy, and while in any project most of us think along both these tracks simultaneously, at Mosa Meat there is a bit more emphasis on the latter. 

When I now reflect on my professional trajectory over the past year, it doesn’t feel like a sudden change of career but more like a natural extension of my personality and interests. In the end, I found that once I had distilled my initial desire to work in academia down to a few core drivers, I no longer thought about my career choices framed as a debate between ‘industry vs. academia’. I realized that what I really wanted to do was work at the bleeding edge of discovery and to strike out in a new and relatively unexplored direction.

Packaged into this career choice was also an inevitable geographic relocation. I won’t say too much about how this factored into my decision, since it’s a subject everyone in science has to contend with, and how one deals with it is specific to the individuals and their circumstances. While moving countries in the middle of the pandemic and wrestling with all the ensuing paperwork was personally a hard decision (especially for us as immigrants), I was fortunate in that my partner (also a scientist) and I were deeply familiar with the infamous two-body problem as it relates to relationships and lab locations, and were well prepared for it.

After five months of working here in beautiful Maastricht with a wonderful team of very smart people who share similar ethics and values around sustainability as me, I still can’t wait to burst into the lab every day. It’s tremendously exciting to work at a start-up that is trying to simultaneously solve not just a difficult biological problem but also a tough engineering and scale-up challenge.

And yes, of course, I’m also driven by the temptation of getting my teeth into a delicious Mosa burger!

(7 votes)

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Doing great science depends on teamwork, whether this is within the lab or in collaboration with other labs. However, sometimes the resources that support our work can be overlooked. In our new series, we aim to shine a light on these unsung heroes of the science world. The fourth article in the series is by Doug Houston (Interim Director, DSHB) who describes the work of the Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank.

A short history of monoclonal antibodies and the DSHB

In 1975, Köhler and Milstein¹ published a method for selecting and immortalizing cells that secreted a single, monospecific antibody, or monoclonal antibody. This advance ushered in the era of ‘biologics’, or biological molecules with exquisite specificity akin to chemical molecules. Monoclonal antibodies are made by fusing an antibody-producing mature B cell (usually obtained from the spleen of an immunized mouse) and an immortalized myeloma cell, producing a ‘hybridoma”. As the number of labs making and using these hybridomas grew, it became apparent that community repositories would be needed to effectively preserve and share these reagents.

The DSHB was one of these early repositories, and is one of the few, if not the only one, still in existence and operating independently. The DSHB was formed in 1986 through a contract with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) involving Thomas August at Johns Hopkins University and Michael Solursh at the University of Iowa. Dr. August ran the Johns Hopkins portion, which generated new hybridomas, mainly focusing on immune cell development, while the University of Iowa group directed by Prof. Solursh in the Department of Biology stored and distributed hybridomas and antibodies.

Prof. Solursh’s lab was focused on limb development and early hybridoma deposits reflected these interests. Early hybridoma deposits expressed antibodies recognizing important molecules in limb development including muscle and matrix proteins. One of the first antibodies deposited was MF 20 (anti-sarcomeric myosin heavy chain), which was contributed by Donald Fischman in 1986. MF 20 remains one of the most requested and robust monoclonal antibodies in the DSHB collection. The skeletal muscle and extracellular matrix hybridoma collections grew substantially in the initial years. After Prof. Solursh tragically died at a young age in 1994, the Iowa division of the DSHB came under the interim directorship of David Soll, and daily operations were run by Karen Jensen, a long-time research associate in the Solursh Lab. As the collection of hybridomas in Iowa grew and the depth of curation and expertise surrounding these antibodies became established, the DSHB was consolidated at Iowa under Prof. Soll’s directorship.

In 1998, the NICHD’s contract with the DSHB was ended (three years ahead of schedule) and the Bank has been independent of NIH and self-supported ever since. Our operating expenses are covered by distribution fees, which are kept as low as possible (at cost) to facilitate wide use of the antibodies/hybridomas by the worldwide scientific research community. The DSHB still maintains close relationships with various NIH entities, including the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Common Fund. The DSHB is the preferred distributor for NIH, HHMI and MDA funded monoclonal antibody efforts (among others).

The people behind the DSHB

The DSHB is run by a relatively small but dedicated group of office staff and scientists. Our staff are experts at navigating the changing rules of university policies, shipping and customs rules, and addressing the concerns of researchers from around the globe. Many have been with the Bank for over a decade and a select few have worked with the DSHB since its inception. Notably, Dr. Karla Daniels (the voice on the phone when you call us!) worked with Profs. Solursh and Soll and has defined the role of our senior scientific curator of the DSHB collection and expert technical advisor, disseminating information on best use of our antibodies. Brian and Rebecca maintain the hybridomas cell lines and produce the antibodies we distribute. Working with hybridomas is an artisanal science, and Brian and Rebecca have mastered the art of coaxing these cells out of cryostorage and getting them to produce large quantities of immunoglobins. Nicki, Mitch and Brian process and manage the orders and track them until delivered to the destination labs. We’ve recently hired a dynamic new cohort of staff including Nick, Mejd and Nisha to continue the tradition of high-quality antibody production and service

What is available for researchers?

The DSHB provides two valuable services for researchers. First, scientists can ‘deposit’ their hybridomas (or antibodies) with the DSHB, granting the DSHB non-exclusive rights to distribute the antibody products as well the hybridoma cell lines (if desired) to the scientific research community. The depositor and the originating institution retain the intellectual property to the hybridoma and thus can benefit from commercialization while still making the reagent available to researchers. Second, researchers can purchase antibodies contributed by other scientists, with the stipulations that the reagents be used for non-commercial research or teaching and not be transferred or reverse engineered. The original mandate of the DSHB was to keep the costs to researchers as low as possible, and we continually strive to be the main provider of high-quality but affordable antibodies. Researchers typically purchase hybridoma-conditioned cell culture supernatant to use in immunostaining or immunoblotting, although other higher concentration options such as bioreactor supernatants or concentrated supernatants are available. Custom orders for large amounts of antibody or purified immunoglobin may also be requested.

We also accept deposits of polyclonal antisera, and although it has not been widely advertised (yet!), the DSHB is also accepting plasmids encoding recombinant antibodies and distributing the antibodies produced by transfected cells (DSHB will not distribute the plasmids themselves). These recombinant antibodies are an important recent advance in antibody technology and are the main way to produce monoclonal antibodies made in rabbits. Rabbit antibodies (traditionally used as polyclonal antisera) have different properties from those of mice, including better responses to shorter epitopes and a more diverse immune response². Rabbits may thus be better for making antibodies against phospho- or other modified amino acid epitopes and represent an important complement to traditional mouse monoclonals.

How can the community contribute?

Because the DSHB considers itself a community resource, the research community provides critical feedback and support for the DSHB. Scientists can help support the DSHB by contributing hybridomas and/or antibodies when appropriate. It’s humbling to see the list of prominent scientists who have contributed reagents (see the ‘contributor spotlight’ on the DSHB website: https://dshb.biology.uiowa.edu). Also, the DSHB and other repositories can be supported by purchasing from them whenever possible. The DSHB and other repositories are critical for fostering rigor and reproducibility in research, a goal promoted by NIH and other funding agencies. Depositing with the DSHB is thus an easy way to implement ‘resource sharing plans’ in grant applications.

Because part of our mission is to keep costs low, the DSHB (unfortunately) does not actively characterize or validate each antibody, but depend on the depositor’s validation.  Validation builds as each antibody accrues citations and confirming applications. Users can contribute by sending feedback about antibodies received from the DSHB. The low cost of DSHB is advantageous for experimenting with different conditions and antibodies, and we hope that labs tell us what works and what doesn’t! As community efforts directed at validating monoclonal antibodies improve (do they specifically recognize the target antigen, and only the target antigen?), we hope to improve access to this information for our collection. Users can always send us images of the antibodies at work, and if we can’t use them on the web site, we’ll disseminate on social media (Twitter: @_DSHB_; FB: https://www.facebook.com/DSHBUI/).

And last, as always, please cite the antibodies and contributors of useful antibodies. This is especially important for new or untried antibodies; many of these are potentially useful but may not be widely adopted unless cited in the literature.

User comments

Many antibodies at the DSHB are unique, absent from the catalogues of large antibody companies, and we often hear from customers how antibodies in the DSHB collection are essential to their research. This is especially true for those working in model organisms where commonly available antibodies made against human and mouse homologues may not work. Many commenters wish we had more antibodies in our collection. We also receive comments appreciative of our customer service. Of course, we receive the ‘rare’ complaint too. We actively troubleshoot use of the antibodies, drawing on the expertise of our scientists, who have not only deep general knowledge, but often long histories of working specifically with the antibodies in question over the years. Our favourite comment however is from someone who wished we were a hundred times bigger!

We hold this as an aspirational goal. If money were no object, we would exponentially grow the number of antibodies to human proteins and establish a robust validation pipeline. But regardless, the DSHB will continue to foster the development and sharing of antibodies for model (and non-model) organisms, which have contributed the most to the discovery of new biological insights.  

Any hidden gems, features that are new, or that researchers might be less aware of?

The DSHB collection has continued to grow, from several hundred in the 1980s -1990s to over 5000 currently. Recent additions include a large number of recombinant antibodies from the Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer program of the National Cancer Institute, which includes over 800 antibodies against cancer-related targets. These include many antibodies related to DNA damage repair, RAS/MAPK signalling, including regulatory phospho-epitopes, as well many transcription factors involved in epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Through the Protein Capture Reagent program of the NIH Director’s Common Fund, we took deposit of over 700 transcription factor antibodies, optimized for ChIP³. These were recently evaluated for ChIP-exo/seq by Frank Pugh’s group at Penn State University, in a recent publication, and many antibodies gave superior results using just ‘raw’ antibody-containing supernatant⁴. Also, last year, the NeuroMab collection of neuroscience and neurodevelopment antibodies (over 500 hybridomas), developed by James Trimmer at UC Davis⁵, was deposited with the DSHB. There are doubtless many hidden gems among the uncharacterized antibodies at the DSHB, although we think the DSHB itself is also a hidden gem, and we are grateful to the Node for featuring us and other science resources!

Douglas W. Houston
Interim Director, DSHB
Iowa City, IA. Jan. 2022

¹Köhler, G. and Milstein, C. (1975). Continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined specificity. Nature 256, 495–497.
²Weber, J., Peng, H. and Rader, C. (2017). From rabbit antibody repertoires to rabbit monoclonal antibodies. Exp Mol Medicine 49, e305.
³Venkataraman, A., Yang, K., Irizarry, J., Mackiewicz, M., Mita, P., Kuang, Z., Xue, L., Ghosh, D., Liu, S., Ramos, P., et al. (2018). A toolbox of immunoprecipitation-grade monoclonal antibodies to human transcription factors. Nature methods 15, 330–338.
⁴Lai, W. K. M., Mariani, L., Rothschild, G., Smith, E. R., Venters, B. J., Blanda, T. R., Kuntala, P. K., Bocklund, K., Mairose, J., Dweikat, S. N., et al. (2021). A ChIP-exo screen of 887 PCRP transcription factor antibodies in human cells. Genome Research 31:1663-1679.
⁵Gong, B., Murray, K. D. and Trimmer, J. S. (2016). Developing high-quality mouse monoclonal antibodies for neuroscience research – approaches, perspectives and opportunities. New Biotechnol 33, 551–564

(3 votes)

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New techniques that have been developed in the last five, ten years have relaunched conversations about the same things that the eugenicists were talking about in the late 19th and early 20th century. And so I think that we teach this history and we talk about the history, not just because it’s interesting, which it is, and recent, but because it informs our current practices.

Adam Rutherford

In the latest episode of the Genetics Unzipped podcast, presenter Dr Kat Arney sits down with geneticist and author Adam Rutherford for a chat about his new book, Control, which explores the darkest side of genetics – the horrific legacy of eugenics, which still persists even today. They discuss why Galton thought categorising people by ‘quality’ was a good idea, the unexpected inspiration for Nazi Germany’s most despicable eugenics policies and how involuntary sterilisation continues to this day, even in seemingly liberal places like California.

Genetics Unzipped is the podcast from The Genetics Society. Full transcript, links and references available online at GeneticsUnzipped.com.

Subscribe from Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Head over to GeneticsUnzipped.com to catch up on our extensive back catalogue.

If you enjoy the show, please do rate and review on Apple podcasts and help to spread the word on social media. And you can always send feedback and suggestions for future episodes and guests to podcast@geneticsunzipped.com Follow us on Twitter – @geneticsunzip

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New research, published in Development, describes repulsive forces driving the uniform distribution of nuclei in the developing embryo. Study conducted at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Ivo Telley & Jorge Carvalho) in collaboration with MBI Singapore (Tim E. Saunders).

The new study provides evidence for the biophysical principles that maintain the order of nuclei in fruit fly embryos. The team found that microtubules, protein polymers that are part of the cell skeleton, form a scaffold generating repulsive forces that keep nuclei at a distance. The positioning of nuclei inside multinucleated cells is very complex, encompassing a large array of possible interactions between neighboring nuclei. This type of cells develops “most robustly by an internuclear repulsion mechanism – which we present in our paper”, explains Ivo Telley, principal investigator at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) and leader of the team that conducted the study. Besides maintaining nuclear positions, repulsive interactions can also reorient nuclear divisions towards unoccupied regions, where repulsion is weakest, avoiding an uneven distribution of nuclei inside large cells.

“Repulsion between nuclei was a hypothesis proposed more than twenty years ago but had never been supported by experiments”, Ivo remarks. This quest for one of “nature’s most basic principles” started in 2013 and involved collaboration with research institutes in Singapore and Germany. Soon after Ivo set up his lab at the IGC, Jorge Carvalho, first author of the study, joined him to implement the innovative experimental approach that would lead to these findings. Fruit fly embryo explants, made by extracting cytoplasm and nuclei from the embryo, allowed the researchers to unveil the mechanisms behind nuclei distribution without the need to use living samples, which are often complex and difficult to analyze. “This approach was key to most of the experimental data in the paper”, Jorge emphasized.

Ultimately, this long journey led the researchers to discover a mechanism that directly impacts cell size and positioning, two properties that define core cellular functions in later embryonic development. But these findings go beyond the development of insects: they also improve our understanding of the evolution of species, such as our own. “Internuclear repulsion was key for the transition from unicellular organisms to multicellularity”, Ivo highlights.

(1 votes)

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In January 2020 we launched the Node Network and now, two years later, we are delighted to announce that we have over 1000 members from 44 different countries. Read on to find out more about how our global directory of developmental and stem cell biologists can help you. 

What is the Node Network? 

The Node Network is a directory of developmental and stem cell biologists and is designed to help those organising meetings, assembly committees, seeking speakers or looking for referees to identify individuals who would not otherwise come to mind.  

Who is the Network for? 

The Node Network is entirely inclusive – anyone from the developmental and stem cell biology community, at any career stage, can add themselves to the directory to become members of the Network. Likewise, anyone searching for reviewers, speakers or committee members can register to access the directory. Users can perform searches based on scientific field, model organism and place of work, but also on aspects of diversity such as gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity and disability status that members can choose to share if they wish. 

Why should you sign up? 

We caught up with some of our members and users to find out how and why they use the network: 

“I often turn to the Node Network to help me identify referees for papers I handle at Development. It’s allowed me to select referees that I wouldn’t normally think of and to find really great ECR referees.” – James Briscoe, Editor-in-chief at Development 

“Having a directory of colleagues is useful, whether you are looking for someone in particular or searching for specific keywords/discipline. In combination with the Node, it is a way for junior scientists to share their views and open discussions with peers, which is a precious way of keeping in touch in those times.” – Gaëlle Recher, Permanent Researcher, Biof lab, CNRS 

“Postdocs are some of the most reliable reviewers around, but they are not always easy to spot online. The Node Network makes it easy to find and contact postdocs with appropriate expertise, providing a diverse pool of potential paper referees.” – Miguel Branco, QMUL, Editor for PLoS ONE and Epigenetics Communications

“I frequently use the Node Network to expand my referee pool so that the opportunities to peer review are spread more equally between all members of the research community. It’s also a great resource to find potential authors from whom I could commission articles.” – Alex Eve, Reviews Editor at Development 

When can I signed up? 

Sign up now for access and entry into the Node Network: https://thenode.biologists.com/network/ 

Birthday celebrations

As part of the birthday celebrations, we are running a ‘Promoting yourself as an ECR’ event hosted by FocalPlane, the Node Network and preLights on Wednesday 23 February at 3pm GMT. Come along and listen to the discussions with our panellists and find out more about the Node Network from our Community Manager and Development Editors. If you can’t make the event and have any feedback or suggestions of how we can improve the Node Network send us an email at thenode@biologists.com  

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Developmental biologists might be interested in a just-published article about Lewis Wolpert’s famous saying, ‘“Not birth, marriage or death but gastrulation”: the life of a quotation in biology’. The piece reconstructs the rich and surprising history of Wolpert’s dictum—including a conference dinner in Antwerp, Jonathan Slack’s From Egg to Embryo and a poster derived from an undergraduate project in Florida—and discusses its uses in teaching, research and public engagement. This uncovers some little-known history of developmental biology, and makes a case for the importance of quotations in communicating recent science.

(1 votes)

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Howdy all,
As promised, here’s a post with book recommendations for developmental biologists.

~First, there are two books that together provide a simply exceptional entry into the field.  They will be entertaining for developmental biologists looking for a broader view, but also represent good recommendations to friends and relatives hoping to grasp what the heck we are doing: 

Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development, by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard.   Written by one of our own Nobel Laureates, this book presents all you really need to know about developmental biology in a brisk and lively 150 pages, accompanied by exceptionally cogent illustrations.  Undeniably my favorite in the genre. 

Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself, by Jaime Davies.  This very readable, if somewhat dense, book focuses more on human development and gets into many of the gritty details passed over by Coming to Life. 

~Two additional books that do the same thing, but from the vantage point of the early 1990s and early 1960s, respectively. Both are written by absolute giants in the field, people whose ideas very much molded our modern practice, These provide a very entertaining glance back in time, and both are geared to a popular audience.

The Triumph of the Embryo, by Lewis Wolpert

How Animals Develop: A Short Account of the Science of Embryology, by C.H. Waddington

~Next are two books that offer a glimpse into the minds of working developmental biologists.

Egg & Ego: An Almost True Story of Life in the Biology Lab, by Jonathan Slack focuses on his work that of others in the race to link growth factors to embryonic induction and the Spemann-Mangold Organizer in Xenopus. Find out which Xenopus hot-shot is “tall and bluff.”

The Dance of Life: The New Science of How a Single Cell Becomes a Human Being, by Magdalena Zernika-Goetz (with Roger Highfield) is a fun read that focuses on her recent work with early mammalian embryos. 

~Here are two outstanding books chart the long, and dare I say it, glorious history of developmental biology:

Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life, by Jane Maienschein unfurls the history of developmental biology with a view toward its impact on ethical and policy issues. 

A History of Embryology, by Joseph Needham is a prolix tome that leaves no corner of European thought on embryos unturned from ancient times to the close of the 18^th Century.  He concludes with a plea for “a theoretical embryology suited in magnitude and spaciousness to the wealth of facts which contemporary investigators are accumulating day by day.”  Guess we all gotta keep our day jobs.

~Two books for thinking about developmental biology as it relates to human form:

Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature, by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson is among the founding documents of disabilities studies and this meditation on human variation is essential reading for all developmental biologists.

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, by Armand Leroi is an exceptionally well-written book explaining developmental biology through discussion of human structural variation.  The title has aged poorly, but the book is spectacular.

~Two great books about evolution that nonetheless brought developmental biology to the masses.

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin provides not just a great overview of developmental biology, but also nicely demonstrates how it informs our understanding of animal evolution.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo, by Sean Carroll is a fantastic synthesis developmental biology’s impact on our understanding of evolution.

~Two books on ancient pondering of the embryo:

The Human Embryo, Aristotle and the European Tradition, Ed. G.R. Dunstan.  This collection of essays edited by a central figure in 20^th Century medical ethics provides an excellent introduction to ancient European thought about embryos.

Imagining the Fetus:  The Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture, Ed. Vanessa Sasson and Jane Marie. With a far wider lens than the title above, this collection of essays was the book that first set me on the path to thinking seriously about the non-European history of embryological thought.

~Miscellanies:

Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Earnest Everett Just, by Kenneth Manning is surely the most important (and best) biography of a developmental biologist.  Charting Just’s experiences as a Black man in science in the early 20^th Century, the book is heartbreaking in its humanity. But the science will be exhilarating to developmental biologists.

The Heritage of Experimental Embryology: Hans Spemann and the Organizer, by Viktor Hamburger is an excellent first-person account of the heady days of experimental embryology.  We can thank his narrative of Hilda Mangold’s life in the Appendix of this book for her finding her rightful place in the minds of modern developmental biologists. 

Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life, by Robert Kohler provides a richly detailed history of the establishment and early evolution of Drosophila genetics as a craft.  A fascinating read. 

From Egg to Embryo: Regional Specification in Early Development (Second Edition), by Jonathan Slack is written for specialists but provides an outstanding overview of the state of the art in about 1990, by which time the major themes of modern developmental biology were squarely in focus.   Provides and exceptional primer on the big picture of our field; great for new students. 

On Growth and Form, by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson is a book that Steven Jay Gould describes as the “greatest work of prose in twentieth-century science.”  A heralded masterpiece, its quantitative approach was prescient to say the least!

The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller is a novel that has nothing whatsoever to do with developmental biology.  But it reads like a mashup of A River Runs Through It and Mad Max and I really liked it and you might want to read it.

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https://www.stowers.org/gradschool/research-scholars

The Stowers Institute for Medical Research (Kansas City, Missouri) is now accepting applications for Stowers Research Scholars, a mentored 1-year postbaccalaureate research fellowship. Through guided research experience and academic career mentoring, this program aims to increase the number of NIH-defined underrepresented students in fundamental biological research.  This year we are accepting up to three students.

This opportunity is open to US citizen or permanent residents from diverse backgrounds with a BA or BS in a STEM field who are interested in pursuing graduate education in basic biological sciences.  Compensation is highly competitive and prior laboratory experience is not required.

For further information and to apply, please visit:
https://www.stowers.org/gradschool/research-scholars

Application Deadline: February 4, 2022
Program Dates: June 6, 2022 – June 16, 2023 (flexible)
Contact: postbac@stowers.org

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Welcome to our light-hearted look at the goings-on in the world of developmental biology in the last two weeks (or so).

Focus on funding

• Congratulations to all the early-career researchers awarded ERC Starting Grants. Once again developmental and stem cell biologists are well represented. https://erc.europa.eu/news/erc-2021-starting-grants-results
• Unfortunately, researchers based in Switzerland and the UK may be forced to leave the country or accept a grant from their national government in place of the ERC award. https://www.science.org/content/article/u-k-and-swiss-researchers-left-limbo-european-grants
• Do we need a new system for funding science? Two recent twitter threads outline some of problems of the current system:

Training advice and opportunities

• Upcoming deadline – https://www.sdbonline.org/choose_development
• 2022 course schedule from MBL: https://www.mbl.edu/education/courses/
• Undergraduate opportunities at MBL:

• On-the-job training?:

• General advice for academics

Outreach

• A beautiful story on the impact an individual can make on a child’s life by engaging with them:

• Foldscope in Africa

• For advice on getting involved in outreach and public engagement: https://thenode.biologists.com/advocacy-and-outreach/

PreLights on #devbio

• Build-it-yourself human thyroid for regenerative therapy
• When endothelial-derived IGFBP3 meets cardiomyocytes: fanning the flames for heart regeneration
• The evolution of human cognition – new research suggests young transposable elements caused major changes in neurodevelopmental gene expression within the human hippocampus
• Sex can be deadly. How piwi-associated RNAs and Hedgehog signaling lead to premature death after mating in C. elegans

If you would like to contribute to our ‘Developing news’ blog, please get in touch at thenode@biologists.com. If you are interested in writing preLights, you can find more information here.

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In our first SciArt profile of 2022, we hear from Diego Galagovsky, a postdoc with a passion for using cartoons to communicate science.

Where are you originally from and what do you work on now?

I am originally from Salta, Argentina. After moving to Buenos Aires for my PhD, then Dijon, France for a postdoc, I now live in Jena, Germany where I am working on a second postdoc.

Were you always going to be a scientist?

Since I was very young, I have been curious and interested in understanding how things work. As far as I remember, I got interested in dinosaurs when I was 4 or 5 years old and that became the gateway into science. I started reading books, increasing in complexity and getting interested in all areas of science, reading about animals, ecology, evolution, anthropology and history, physics and astronomy. In school and later in high school, I adored all classes linked to science, and especially biology. And as a kid I would always say that I wanted to be a scientist.

And what about art – have you always enjoyed it?

At the same time, I always enjoyed artistic expression. As a kid I took crafts classes and learned the basics for drawing. It was fun. I was always combining it with my love for science, drawing animals, dinosaurs and planets. I also loved cartoons and learned to draw by copying my favourite characters. Later, I became interested in comic books and started trying to emulate the style and make my own.

What or who are your most important artistic influences?

My love for cartoons and comic books has had the greatest impact on my style. I take a lot of my inspiration from cartoons I loved throughout my life and from my favourite comic books. I also like visual arts and design in general, so I try to mix in whatever I find nice and appealing. My main interest is in experimenting and learning something new every time I decide to make a drawing.

How do you make your art?

I work mainly digitally. I like the results I obtain, and I also find it comfortable because I can work almost anywhere, it takes up little space and allows me to work on several projects at the same time. I have been interested in digital art since I was very little. As a kid I never had access to fancy software or someone to teach me. I remember using basic software and pushing it as far as I could. With the popularization of the internet, I finally started learning to use more professional software design. I learned enough to then start self-teaching and experimenting. Regarding the process of my work, it usually involves a lot of thinking until I get the final idea for the subject and the composition. Then as I work it starts evolving and the initial idea starts changing. It is a very rewarding and stimulating process. 

Does your art influence your science at all, or are they separate worlds?

Now I am working mainly on drawings and illustrations that connect directly to my scientific interests. I am doing works that are aimed at not only being aesthetically pleasing but also educational. I want them to be interesting enough to attract people to learn about science.

My art also influences my science in the sense that it has helped me better communicate my projects and my results. I like visual storytelling and understanding this language has helped me a lot with the communication aspect of my scientific work. I’ve also done figures and graphical abstracts for others in which I infused a bit of the artistic interests I had at the time.

What are you thinking of working on next?

I have been working on projects that involved thinking fast and working on a short schedule. As part of trying to work on science education and dissemination, I have been trying to take on challenges online that involve producing drawings every day, like Inktober or now an Advent Calendar featuring Drosophila flies and the science we do with them. I have also made a sticker app for WhatsApp with the same objective, and now I plan to explore that further: can we use stickers to interest people in science? Next, I want to experiment with the visual storytelling format of comic books, and how to use it to tell science online in a more engaging way. I have many ideas I want to explore in those areas.

You can find Diego on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as well as his website: sci-flies.com

Thanks to Diego and all the other SciArtists we have featured so far. You can find the full list here. We’re always on the lookout for new people to feature in this series – whatever kind of art you do, from sculpture to embroidery to music to drawing, if you want to share it with the community just email thenode@biologists.com (nominations are also welcome!)

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