PZ Myers. 2005 Dec 29. Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus retrospective. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/nusslein_volhard_and_wieschaus_retrospective/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 04.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Thursday, December 29, 2005
Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus retrospective
In the late 1970s, I was an undergraduate working in a fly development lab, and I heard rumors from the people working there about this wild and crazy experiment going on at EMBL—they were ripping through the whole fly genome, trying to put together the big picture of patterning in early embryos.
A little later, I was in grad school, and this amazing paper came out in Nature. I read it, but I have to admit…I wasn't entirely aware of the significance. Lots of mutants, lots of genes, but I was focused on Mauthner neurons and growth cones and synaptic remodeling and cytoskeleton, so I set it aside.
Yet later, my graduate research had taken a slight turn; I'd discovered that spinal motoneurons were identifiable and segmentally repeated, and I got interested in segmentation again, and rediscovered that lovely paper, and the incredible bloom of new work that had followed from it. It was one of the factors that decided me on going back to insects for my post-doctoral work.
It kind of snuck up on me. I can't claim to have predicted the revolution the work of Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus would cause in my field, but now with hindsight it's clear and dramatic. This was the threshold event that changed the way we look at development, genetics, and evolution.
The Nature Genetics blog, Free Association, has a brief look back on the seminal work of Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus, published 25 years ago last October. It's amazing stuff, and if you want to understand where the new metamorphosis of modern biology came from, this was the seed.
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That was way more interesting than the 'news' below that exorcism is for lunatics. It in cool to think of the real changes that have happened in our lifetimes.
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The Nobel lectures for Nusslein-Volhard and Weischaus (linked also from the Nature Genetics blog), and for Ed Lewis, are here:
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1995/index.html
and are well worth reading. Lewis's contribution was, of course, at least equal to that of the others and preceded them by many years. -
OT: moonbat on the air
adventures with creationists -
As a postdoc in a Drosophila lab in the early 80s I breathed some of the heady atmosphere of the time when the fruits of the Nusslein-Wieschaus mutant screen were just beginning to be widely exploited. I was little more than a spectator at this incredible scientific revolution and I didn't ultimately make a career in research, but still it's an experience I'll treasure all my life and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. The really beautiful thing about Wieschaus and Nusslein's screen was that, compared to all the genomics / proteomics tricks available nowadays, it was so low-tech. It only- "only"!- required deep insight, truly remarkable courage, and an incredible capacity for painstaking work to undertake it. And yet how many people in our society, who are so busy following the doings of every degenerate "celebrity", have ever heard about this triumph of the human spirit?
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Not to make a warez request or anything, but does anybody know of a publicly available source for a pdf (or even an image scan) of this paper? I'm inspired to read it now, but from previous experience, I know that xeroxing our library's 25-year-old copy will prove frustrating at best.
As a relative outsider, I know that one thing about this line of research that amazed me (and I think even people in the fly world) was that, once again, random was enough to do the job. In this case, the problem was to find *all* of the genes responsible for anterior/posterior segmental patterning. So the straight-forward approach is to do a saturating screen, where you just use EMS (I think?) to create many thousands of mutated chromosomes, stable homozygous lines from those mutations, and then screen away. I know the "empty cuticle" prep was a key innovation here, but still: this was a screen that could have been done 30-50 years before. I think somehow that the workers who could have done it must have decided that it really was somehow riskier than the mathematics said it should have been. But there you go...that's how you win the Nobel Prize.
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"cubitus interruptus, wingless, gooseberry, hedgehog, fused, patch, paired, even-skipped, odd-skipped, barrel, runt, engrailed, Kruppel, knirps, and hunchback"
It is endearing that biologists and mathematicians use a lot of humor in naming things. Does anybody know if there are more science subcultures who do that a lot, and if there are any connections bewteen them?
BTW, the first name is an obvious example of biologists natural obsession with sex. (And squids, of course!) I can imagine that Pharyngulas server thinks of its CPU as the Central Porn Unit... in a nice and considerate way naturally!
"It only- "only"!- required deep insight, truly remarkable courage, and an incredible capacity for painstaking work to undertake it."
Looks a lot like Marshall and Warren on helicobacter pylori, doesn't it? Except they got a lot of recognition. Perhaps because medicine seems more important for the average Joe/Joan.#: Posted by on 12/30 at 11:43 AM - You must be hanging with the wrong crowd--Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus got a lot of recognition. The Nobel ain't enough for you?
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Humor in naming things? Physicists gave us "charmed" quarks, and quarks in flavors. Hoyle gave us "Big Bang" (which leads to one of my favorite responses to a fundy who asks what came before the Big Bang: "The Big Foreplay.")
What do chemists do?#: Posted by on 12/30 at 01:09 PM -
The link for the paper is at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v287/n5785/pdf/287795a0.pdf . It might not work if you don't have a subscription though. Nature really ought to allow "classic" papers like this to be freely downloaded..
Interestingly, Drosophila genes can have funny names (check out http://tinman.vetmed.helsinki.fi/eng/drosophila.html for a nice list) but C. elegans genes must conform to the most restrictive nomenclature ever: three letters, a dash, and a number. -
"You must be hanging with the wrong crowd--Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus got a lot of recognition."
If you mean me - possibly, I seem to hang around here.
Uh, I was responding to Steves lament about lack of _public_ recognition.
Ed,
Yes, physicists have humor, especially highenergy and theoretical physics, but it could be a lot more, I think. I agree that the name of the creation event is a nice and unfortunately sparse physics double-entendre. Maybe we can come up with more examples? My mind draws a blank at the moment, I'm afraid.#: Posted by on 01/01 at 01:50 PM