Developmental biologist John Wallingford, in We’re all Developmental Biologists argued that anyone who has ever wondered how a loved one’s pregnancy is going “has contemplated the embryo.” Humans have naturally been curious about how organisms grow to become a certain species, and as such I found myself pulled into dev bio research too. Developmental Biology (Dev Bio) is a long-standing field of study interested in answering fundamental questions about how organisms grow and become, well, themselves! Here, I share a bit of how developmental biology itself grew and changed over time, as well as my own experience getting into development research!
The field and history of dev bio is particularly interesting to me because it’s one of the oldest fields of biology known to us. There’s no real “father of developmental biology,” unlike the giants of genetics like Gregor Mendel or Thomas Hunt Morgan. Some might argue that Aristotle could be considered the first developmental biologist, as he wrote on the embryology of sheep. However, Buddhist literature accurately describes the stages of embryonic development and predates standardized developmental staging (Carnegie stages) by some 2000 years. Additionally, Tibetan medical texts from around 200 A.D. outline concepts essential for development like maternal gradients.
Jumping ahead thousands of years from these accounts lands us in the era of the almighty microscope around the 1600s. Finally, scientists could get a look at the intricate details of a developing embryo. While now embryology refers specifically to the research surrounding how an embryo forms, at that time, developmental biology and embryology were one and the same. Many scientists took to examining developing embryos, meticulously documenting and describing what they saw. Indeed, even the chemist Robert Boyle dabbled in developmental studies during this time period. By the late 1800s, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species also considered evolutionary processes in a developmental context (Darwin 1859). Scientists were quickly captivated by the idea that differences in how organisms are initially shaped could lead to the massive diversity of life on Earth! However, early evolution & development (evo-devo) studies couldn’t pinpoint how organisms’ forms were shaped solely by visual inspection. By the early 1900s, developmental and evolutionary biology had parted ways. Two distinct camps of biologists emerged after this split: developmentalists performed surgical experiments, such as John Saunders’ studies on limb development. Evolutionists, on the other hand, studied genes as a way to describe how organisms were shaped. Yet, neither field alone could fully explain how embryos develop into complex organisms.
In the late 1900s, the dev bio field experienced a renaissance. A massive undertaking by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard revealed that a handful of certain genes patterned the early fruit fly embryo in distinct regions. This study prompted researchers across the globe to investigate their various models, eventually finding many other animals shared conserved genes. After these similarities became noted, researchers quickly found genes (e.g., hedgehog) that were conserved across the entire animal kingdom! These pivotal studies solidified the union of evolution and development studies once again. Since this re-marriage of development and evolution, the field of evo-devo biology is now the spearhead of understanding body plans and formation. For instance, previous genetics studies in the fruit fly revealed that insect wings are patterned by genes that regulate both body and leg regions. But how is this possible? Which region did insect wings originally come from? In 2020, Heather Bruce and Nipam Patel proposed that insect wings evolved from ancient crustacean leg segments, illustrating how modern research refines and expands our understanding. Even I, too, am asking fundamental questions about how parasites are shaped the way they are!
Similar to how a clump of cells eventually becomes organized into an entire embryo, my own journey into dev bio began with a whirlwind of uncertainty. Over time, it has shaped into one of the most fun and fulfilling adventures of my life. Well before starting my undergraduate degree, I was curious about how organisms’ bodies are shaped and formed. To nobody’s surprise, my favorite undergrad class was Anatomy & Physiology. How structures relate to functions, from the organism level all the way down to a single protein in a cell, has always captivated me. I believed for the longest time that the way I would sate my curiosity was to pursue medical school, as I would constantly be learning new things in that field. It took until the week before I was going to take the MCAT for me to realize that I was not supposed to be a medical doctor (please do NOT just skip the MCAT like I did, you will not get refunded for it).
I was then fretting and floundering like I had thrown my life away after making that decision and felt completely lost on where to go. After nearly a whole summer of introspection and self-criticism, I decided to go to grad school and pursue a PhD. I arrived here at the University of Georgia terrified and full of imposter syndrome. I hadn’t even picked up a micropipette before my first lab rotation, I didn’t actually know how to read scientific papers, and I thought I’d made a huge mistake. After figuring out which lab I wanted to join, I was able to really begin exploring possible research interests. I quickly fell in love with developmental biology as it fed the original curiosity that brought me toward medicine & biology in the first place. After feeding this curiosity once again, I find myself asking questions about how our lab’s model decides how its body is shaped. Now, “home” for me is doing segmentation research on an animal that many old-school biologists say isn’t segmented at all.
Biology is an ever-evolving field, and dev bio exemplifies its dynamic nature. If you’re a curious biology student uncertain about your future, remember: staying open-minded might lead you to a surprising and fulfilling path. Since nobody is really the father of developmental biology, there’s plenty of room for you to make a splash! Many labs now have interests in the field of evo-devo, offering countless opportunities to explore how life takes shape! And who knows—it might just become your biology “home” too.
