© El País
The developmental biologists Celia Herrera-Rincon and Michael Levin at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University found evidence that signals from the developing brain affect the form of distant tissue structures in tadpoles.
The tiny tadpole embryo looked like a bean. One day old, it didn't even have a heart yet. The researcher in a white coat and gloves who hovered over it made a precise surgical incision where its head would form. Moments later, the brain was gone, but the embryo was still alive.
The brief procedure took
Celia Herrera-Rincon, a neuroscience postdoc at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, back to the country house in Spain where she had grown up, in the mountains near Madrid. When she was 11 years old, while walking her dogs in the woods, she found a snake,
Vipera latastei. It was beautiful but dead. "I realized I wanted to see what was inside the head," she recalled. She performed her first "lab test" using kitchen knives and tweezers, and she has been fascinated by the many shapes and evolutionary morphologies of the brain ever since. Her collection now holds about 1,000 brains from all kinds of creatures.
This time, however, she was not interested in the brain itself, but in how an African clawed frog would develop without one. She and her supervisor,
Michael Levin, a software engineer turned developmental biologist, are investigating whether the brain and nervous system play a crucial role in laying out the patterns that dictate the shapes and identities of emerging organs, limbs and other structures.
Comment: How much better life would be on the planet if organizations like DARPA devoted a fraction of their resources on problems not connected to war.