Morphogenesis Quotes

We must infer that a plant or animal of any species, is made up of special units, in all of which there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to aggregate into the form of that species: just as in the atoms of a salt, there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to crystallize in a particular way.‎

My prime interests are in evolution and development. I use the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines.

The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.

As with most animal eggs, the early events of amphibian development are largely independent of the environment, and the processes leading to cell differentiation must involve a redistribution and interaction of constituents already present in the fertilized egg.

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.

I’m interested in natural growth patterns, and the beautiful forms that only nature creates. How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I’m trying to understand.

It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.

It is now widely realized that nearly all the 'classical' problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade. The entry of large numbers of American and other biochemists into the field will ensure that all the chemical details of replication and transcription will be elucidated. Because of this, I have long felt that the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system.

Embryology reveals surprising similarities between early embryos of seemingly quite different animals. And it also shows that some structures that may look very different later on have fundamental similarities in the way they form.

Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough.

The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random.

We still have very little understanding of how we can tweak form or shape at the genetic level. We certainly haven't unlocked those secrets.

I've wanted to write a book on embryology, that extraordinary journey where you start off as a single cell and end up with a human body, for a general audience for years.

We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same basic mechanism used in producing those striking structures that are crystals, with their beautiful plane faces.

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.