OXFORD, UK, July 9, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Richard Gardner, an embryologist at the University of Oxford, UK, has repeated little known experiments first conducted in the 1980s in Flushing, New York by Jean Smith of Queen’s College which demonstrate that the human body is shaped beginning at the moment of conception/fertilization. Which side of the microscopic embryo will form the back and head, are not left to later development as has been believed by embryologists, but are set out in the minutes and hours after the sperm and egg unite to form a new human being.
The July 4 issue of the scientific journal Nature reports that “Just five years ago…mammalian embryos were thought to spend their first few days as a featureless orb of cells. Only later, at about the time of implantation into the wall of the uterus, were cells thought to acquire distinct ‘fates’ determining their positions in the future body.” Researchers tagged specific points on mammalian embryos (blastocysts) shortly after fertilization successfully demonstrating that they come to lie at predictable points in the embryo. “Rather than being a naive sphere, it seems that a newly fertilized egg has a defined top-bottom axis that sets up the equivalent axis in the future embryo,” says Nature. Some studies suggest that such differentiation happens as early as the two celled stage.
The journal concludes from the study: “What is clear is that developmental biologists will no longer dismiss early mammalian embryos as featureless bundles of cells – and that leaves them with some work to do.”
See the story in the journal Nature: Nature 418, 14 – 15 (04 Jul 2002) DOI: 10.1038/418014a News Feature (link available only with paid registration or you may purchase full article): https://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v418/n6893/full/418014a_fs.html