Developmental Biology: A Very Short Introduction

ISBN-13: 9780199601196 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 144 str.

Lewis Wolpert

Opis

From a single cell--a fertilized egg--comes an elephant, a fly, or a human. How does this astonishing feat happen? How does the egg "know" what to become? How does it divide into the different cells, the separate tissues, the brain, the fingernail--every tiniest detail of the growing fetus? In this Very Short Introduction, renowned scientist Lewis Wolpert shows how the field of developmental biology seeks to answer these profound questions. A distinguished developmental biologist himself, Wolpert offers a concise and highly readable account of what we now know about development, discussing the first vital steps of growth, the patterning created by Hox genes and the development of form, embryonic stem cells, the timing of gene expression and its management, chemical signaling, and growth. Drawing on scientific breakthroughs in genetics, evolution, and molecular biology, he illuminates processes that are deeply rooted in evolutionary history, revealing how information is held in genes whose vital timing in switching on and off is orchestrated by a host of proteins expressed by other genes.

O autorze

Lewis Wolpert is Emeritus Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College, London. His research interests are in the mechanisms involved in the development of the embryo. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. His books include The Triumph of the Embryo (OUP, 1991), Malignant Sadness - The Anatomy of Depression (Faber, 1999), Principles of Development, of which he is principal author, (4th edition, OUP 2011), and How We live, and Why We Die - the secret life of cells (Faber, 2009). He is also co-chief editor of the Journal of Theoretical Biology.