Word: neurobiologist
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...Neurobiologist Evan Balaban of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego undertook the experimental tour de force to explore one of developmental biology's nagging questions: Where in the brain are the cells controlling specific behaviors? Using delicate surgical techniques pioneered by Nicole le Douarin in Paris, with whom he worked for a year, Balaban cut tiny windows in the shells of fertilized chicken and quail eggs that had incubated for a couple of days. Guided by special stains developed by the French researcher, he probed the embryos' minuscule, 1-mm- to 2-mm-long neural tubes (out of which...
...distinctive three-note quail song. After much trial and error, Balaban--an amateur baroque musician who sometimes serenaded his chicks with his lute to stimulate their singing--traced the movements and sounds to two very different areas in the brain. "That's new. That's interesting," says Caltech neurobiologist Masakazu Konishi. "It means posture and sound that usually occur together in crowing are controlled by different neuromechanisms...
...from in vitro fertilization? In both those cases, after all, an undeniable reductiveness is going on, a shriveling of the complexity of the human body to the certainty of a single cell in a Petri dish. If we accept this kind of tinkering, can't we accept cloning? Harvard neurobiologist Lisa Geller admits that intellectually, she doesn't see a difference between in vitro technology and cloning. "But," she adds, "I admit it makes my stomach feel nervous...
...DIEGO: A neurobiologist in California has found a way to implant the natural behavior of one animal into an entirely different species. The breakthrough, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes just a week after scientists stunned the world by cloning an adult mammal and further demonstrates science fiction's uncanny knack for becoming reality. In the experiment, a chicken was made to act like a quail by transferring certain brain cells from a quail embryo to the brain of a chicken embryo. Once hatched, the chicken's movement's resembled those of a quail...
...spinal cord and the brain. Like a strong scent carried by the wind, the protein encoded by the hedgehog gene (so called because in its absence, fruit-fly embryos sprout a coat of prickles) diffuses outward from the cells that produce it, becoming fainter and fainter. Columbia University neurobiologist Thomas Jessell has found that it takes middling concentrations of this potent morphing factor to produce a motor neuron and lower concentrations to make an interneuron (a cell that relays signals to other neurons, instead of to muscle fibers, as motor neurons...