Year: 2022

BIRTH OF EMBRYOLOGY. "Jacques Loeb (1859-1924) experimented on embryos in Europe and the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Among the first to study embryos through experimentation, Loeb helped found the new field of experimental embryology." https://lnkd.in/e74zn8H View in LinkedIn

CREATING THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. "Loeb showed scientists how to induce artificial parthenogenesis, thus refuting the idea that spermatozoa alone were necessary to develop eggs into embryos and confirming the idea that the chemical constitution of embryos’ environment affected their development. Furthermore, Loeb’s work showed that scientists could manipulate materials in a laboratory to create, as he called the process, the beginning stages of life." https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/jacques-loeb-1859-1924 View in LinkedIn

FIRST SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY. "It is in the end still possible that I find my dream realized, to see a constructive or engineering biology in place of a biology that is merely analytical." Artificial parthenogenesis brought Loeb scientific fame, and even popular notoriety, as a modern Faust. He used that heroic stature to continue his quest in what he considered the true Eden of California. Loeb worked alone on the shores of the Pacific for seven years, returning east periodically to proclaim the new scientific era." https://lnkd.in/eQf5Evv View in LinkedIn

SALT BATH, VIRGIN BIRTH. "Loeb found that by treating sea urchin eggs with appropriate inorganic salt solutions he could initiate embryological development, a process which up to that time had required the sperm of the male urchin. Physical chemistry could be a tool for altering the basic process of reproduction." (1899). https://lnkd.in/eQf5Evv View in LinkedIn

CONTROL OVER LIFE. "The nature of the control over life in artificial parthenogenesis was different from that exhibited by Loeb's earlier work on heteromorphosis. In one sense it was less dramatic, since it led to no visibly new forms, but only to that familiar embryological object, the sea urchin pluteus. But that was no disadvantage. Heteromorphosis could be downgraded as merely the creation of monsters, an imitation of nature's mistakes with no real biological significance." https://lnkd.in/eQf5Evv View in LinkedIn

NO BIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE. "Such an objection could not so easily be made against artificial parthenogenesis. It was a change in the mode of production (or reproduction), an improvement upon nature in that it eliminated an unnecessary element (the sperm), and offered the possibility of replacing half the sea urchin population with a mixture of salts." https://lnkd.in/eQf5Evv View in LinkedIn

UNNATURAL AND DISORDERLY. "The invention of artificial parthenogenesis represented an attack on the privileged status of natural modes of reproduction. A race of fatherless sea urchins was a nonnatural product completely outside the orderly structure and gradual evolution of the animal economy." https://lnkd.in/eQf5Evv View in LinkedIn

EXTRAORDINARY POSSIBILITIES. "Nature contained only a very restricted set of modes of reproduction; an engineering biology could lead to expansion of possibilities far beyond those that might appear through the process of evolution, or through a biology whose framework was bounded by evolutionism." https://lnkd.in/eQf5Evv View in LinkedIn

NOVEL HYBRIDS. "Artificial parthenogenesis proved that it was possible to separate the sperm's function as initiator of development from its role as carrier of the male hereditary characters. Loeb believed that it would be possible to manipulate each independently, and perhaps create hitherto unknown sets of hybrids by superimposing artificial parthenogenesis on eggs fertilized by foreign sperm that were normally unable to initiate development of those eggs." https://lnkd.in/eQf5Evv View in LinkedIn

MAMMALIAN VIRGIN BIRTH. "Sea urchins were only the beginning. Loeb concluded the short announcement of his discovery by asking "whether we may expect to produce artificial parthenogenesis in mammalians.... I consider it possible that only the ions of the blood prevent the parthenogenetic origins of embryos in mammalians, and I think it further not impossible that a transitory change in the ions of the blood may also allow complete parthenogenesis in mammalians." https://lnkd.in/eQf5Evv View in LinkedIn