Book information

Embryos Under the Microscope: The diverging meanings of life by Jane Maienschein

Published by: Harvard University Press

Price: $28.95/£21.95

Science should call the shots when it comes to policy about embryos (Image: Dr Gopal Murti/SPL)

The embryo was little more than a hypothesis until the microscope came along. Jane Maienschien

explores early life in Embryos Under the Microscope

CONSIDER the embryo. The most likely thing to spring to mind will be a pink, prawn-like creature

with bulbous eyes. But now consider how you would imagine the earliest stages of life if you had

never seen an image of an embryo.

Modern technology allows us not only to see embryos of

various species but also to create, dissect and

reconstruct them from scratch, even furnishing them with

new instructions to alter their development. It is

remarkable, then, that until the invention of microscopy,

the human embryo was just a hypothesis.

Before we had the technology to visualise the

development of embryos, the physical emergence of life

was a ripe breeding ground for ideas. Some believed

that a mini version of a fully formed baby existed from

the outset and simply grew bigger, whereas others

proposed that a baby's form emerged over time, shaped

by some "vital" force.

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In the beginning: The story of the embryo

05 May 2014 by Linda Geddes

Magazine issue 2967. Subscribe and save

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From issue 2967 of New Scientist magazine,

page 48-49.

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Religion also had something to say about it, with both the

Jewish Torah and the Catholic Church viewing life as

unformed and fluid for the first 40 days, after which the

developing baby became "ensouled". Pope Pius IX

changed his mind about this in 1869, decreeing instead that life began at conception.

In Embryos Under the Microscope, biologist Jane Maienschein explores the scientific, cultural, legal

and philosophical history of embryos. This is a big task for a single book, but she does a thorough

job. Having worked in the office of anti-abortionist US Congressman Matt Salmon in the late 1990s

and lectured federal judges on the state of embryo research, she also speaks with authority.

Maienschein makes no bones about her views on issues such as assigning rights to embryos.

"Policy should be consistent with and not in conflict with the available and established scientific

knowledge," she writes, adding that those who identify the biological moment of fertilisation as the

social moment when rights are assigned to individuals "are taking a huge leap of imagination about

what a fertilised egg actually is".

The book starts with Aristotle, who cut open chicken's eggs and peered at the gelatinous red speck

that dirtied the yellow yolk as it grew and changed form – he even observed the moment that the

heart began to beat. Although Aristotle lived some 2400 years ago, many of his ideas about the

emergence of human life are close to the mark. For example, he linked both the regular loss of

menstrual fluid in women and the ejaculation of fluid by men with fertility. His problem was in

explaining how these fluids gave rise to solid form.

Two millennia later, the discovery of eggs and sperm, thanks to the newly invented microscope,

provided another piece of the puzzle, and the discovery of DNA in the 1950s provided yet another.

But less-well-known events between these milestones also make for a fascinating read. I learned

how 19th-century physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach killed his family dog in order to work out why

she was in heat. The sacrifice wasn't entirely in vain: Burdach found an egg in her uterus, fuelling

the idea that mammalian sexual reproduction begins with cells rather than fluids.

Maienschein points out that one of the great ironies of early biology was that studying life most often

involved having to kill it – a message that resonates in the debate over the collection of stem cells

from human embryos today. These colourful examples transform what could otherwise be an

extremely complex or even dull subject into one of wonder and reflection.

Some of Maienschein's writing verges on the poetic. Take her account of collecting Nereis worms at

night from Eel Pond in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She describes the worms rising to the surface

to begin a mating dance: a movement that she sees echoed in the dance of the chromosomes within

their eggs. I also liked how the book helped me to feel my way into the minds of people living before

the discovery of knowledge that we now take for granted, such as the existence of egg and sperm

cells. How strange it must have been to find yourself pregnant with no concept of how and why a

baby came to be inside you.

It also made me reflect that whereas some ideas about the mother's role have changed – such as

believing that a child's gender is influenced by which side the mother sleeps on – the tendency to

burden pregnant women with restrictive advice based on often spurious evidence endures. The

basic premise: deprive the mother to benefit the child.

The later chapters provide an up-to-date account of the current state of embryo and stem cell

research, and speculate about the future. Although they can lack the human stories and

philosophical basis of the historical chapters, as a guide to embryo research, they are hard to beat.

In all, Embryos Under the Microscope made me appreciate the phenomenally complex chain of

events by which a person or animal develops. It really is amazing that any of us exist at all.

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