Source: https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php?title=Embryology_History_-_Viktor_Hamburger&amp;oldid=351291
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 14:35:17+00:00

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Viktor Hamburger (1900 – 2001) was a founding researcher in the field of developmental neuroscience. Established with Rita Levi-Montalcini the role of neural growth factors (neurotrophic), in particular Nerve Growth Factor (NGF)) for neuronal survival during development.
Also know for his development, along with Howard Hamilton, of the historic chicken staging sequence the Hamburger Hamilton Stages.
University of Freiburg with Hans Spemann. He was a graduate student in Spemann’s department at Freiburg during the years that the organizer graft experiments were being performed.
1933 - United States, first in Chicago and then at Washington University.
Below are example images of the Hamburger Hamilton stage 21 chicken embryo with timing and descriptions of developmental features.
Monographs on the History and Philosophy of Biology, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, l988, 8vo, pp. xii, 196, illus., L22.50.
"I came into embryology as a postdoctoral fellow in l974, when the subject was rather unfashionable and neglected. 0ver my first few years I spent long hours in the library and read with fascination of an earlier "golden age" between the two World Wars. slowly I pieced together the story of the organized It took time because most of the papers had to be retrieved from dusty stacks and because most were in German, a language I read poorly. How I would have loved to read Professor Hamburgers book then!
The organizer graft is a transplantation of tissue from the dorsal lip of the blastopore of an amphibian gastrula to the prospective ventral lip of another individual. When performed correctly, it yields a mirror syrnmetrical double dorsal embryo, rather like a pair of siamese twins joined belly to belly. The lower half of the duplication, often called the secondary axis, consists of a notochord derived from the graft and the remainder, mainly somites and neural tube, is induced from the ventral tissues of the host. The organizer graft was first reported in a famous paper by Spemann and Mangold in l924.
Hamburger was a graduate student in Spemann’s department at Freiburg during the years that the organizer grafts were first being performed. In his book he describes the scientific background, the character of experimental work at the time, and something of the personality of the individuals involved. It is certainly sobering to be reminded of the experimental difficulties of the time. In my laboratory today we generate two or three batches of Xenopus eggs each week, we manipulate their developmental rate with incubators at different temperatures, and we protect our grafts and explant cultures from infection with antibiotics. During the l920s, embryologists had to collect their eggs (usually newt eggs) from the wild during the brief breeding season in the spring. The whole year’s experiments would be performed in a mad rush, with horrific mortality rates due to poor culture conditions and to infection. It is because of these difficulties that the famous organizer paper describes only six cases, of which only two show good double-dorsal duplications.
Hamburger goes on to describe the subsequent work on early amphibian development. Unfortunately the organizer, which we now regard as the source of a dorsalizing positional Signal, was then seen mainly as an agent of neural induction. In 1932 three groups, all in Germany, simultaneously reported that killed organizer tissue had neural-inducing activity. This sparked off the famous «gold rush" for the chemical nature of the organizer, using neuralization of gastrula ectoderm as the assay. The hopelessness of such a task, with the biochemical techniques available over 50 years ago, may be assessed from the fact that we have only just succeeded in detecting a few picrograms per embryo of the mesoderm—inducing factor bFGF, using affinity HPLC and ultrasensitive immunochemical methods. In fact, neural induction, particularly in newts, is a rather unspecific process and many substances can trigger it, including some synthetic chemicals which do not occur in embryos at all. This realization caused much consternation, and the high morale and sense of excitement evident in the literature of the ’20s and ’30s faded rapidly. The field as a whole went into eclipse during the second World War, partly because of the failure of the gold rush, but also because of the dispersal of the German scientists whose efforts had led the way throughout this period.
The real legacy of the period was not so much the work on the organizer, which, with the benefit of hindsight can be seen as largely misdirected, but rather the formulation of a set of self-consistent concepts for the description and analysis of early development For example, fate, potency, induction, competence, and regulation were widely used as categories of explanation in this period. Now, when we have the technical means to investigate the inner workings of cells, this heritage is available not as a set of explanations but as a set of problems requiring solution.
Probably no one did more in this vital task than Johannes Holtfreter, who receives extensive coverage in the second half of the book. His in vitm isolation experiments and his work on the regional specificity of neural induction particularly helped to define the style and standard of experimental embryology for decades to come.
Hamburger’s book really finishes at the second World War, although one or two later experiments are described. The modern era, starting with Nieuwkoop’s discovery of mesoderm induction, is not covered. so this is not really a book for those who want to understand amphibian development, but rather a lucid and interesting account of a critical period in scientific history. It has a special fascination because it is written by a participant who can not only tell us what happened, but also what it felt like at the time."
↑ 4.0 4.1 Witkowski JA. (1988). The work of spemann: the heritage of experimental embryology. Science , 241, 365-6. PMID: 17734868 DOI.
Hamburger V & Narayanan CH. (1969). Effects of the deafferentation of the trigeminal area on the motility of the chick embryo. J. Exp. Zool. , 170, 411-26. PMID: 5804915 DOI.
Decker JD & Hamburger V. (1967). The influence of different brain regions on periodic motility of the chick embryo. J. Exp. Zool. , 165, 371-83. PMID: 6076902 DOI.
Hamburger V & Oppenheim R. (1967). Prehatching motility and hatching behavior in the chick. J. Exp. Zool. , 166, 171-203. PMID: 6080550 DOI.
Narayanan CH & Hamburger V. (1971). Motility in chick embryos with substitution of lumbosacral by brachial and brachial by lumbosacral spinal cord segments. J. Exp. Zool. , 178, 415-31. PMID: 5161044 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1997). A historic moment: the discovery of the chemical transmission of embryonic inductions. Dev. Neurosci. , 19, 293-6. PMID: 9215874 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1996). Differentiation potencies of isolated parts of the urodele gastrula, by J. Holtfreter. Dev. Dyn. , 205, 223-44. PMID: 8850560 <223::AID-AJA4>3.0.CO;2-K DOI.
Hamburger V. (1996). Differentiation potencies of isolated parts of the anuran gastrula, by J. Holtfreter. Dev. Dyn. , 205, 217-22. PMID: 8850559 <217::AID-AJA3>3.0.CO;2-L DOI.
Hamburger V. (1996). Introduction: Johannes Holtfreter, pioneer in experimental embryology. Dev. Dyn. , 205, 214-6. PMID: 8850558 <214::AID-AJA2>3.0.CO;2-L DOI.
Hamburger V. (1993). The history of the discovery of the nerve growth factor. J. Neurobiol. , 24, 893-7. PMID: 8228966 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1992). The stage series of the chick embryo. Dev. Dyn. , 195, 273-5. PMID: 1304822 DOI.
Hamburger V & Hamilton HL. (1992). A series of normal stages in the development of the chick embryo. 1951. Dev. Dyn. , 195, 231-72. PMID: 1304821 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1992). History of the discovery of neuronal death in embryos. J. Neurobiol. , 23, 1116-23. PMID: 1469378 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1989). The journey of a neuroembryologist. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. , 12, 1-12. PMID: 2648945 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1984). Scientific survey. Int. J. Dev. Neurosci. , 2, 505-6. PMID: 24874390 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1980). Trophic interactions in neurogenesis: a personal historical account. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. , 3, 269-78. PMID: 6998342 DOI.
Hollyday M & Hamburger V. (1976). Reduction of the naturally occurring motor neuron loss by enlargement of the periphery. J. Comp. Neurol. , 170, 311-20. PMID: 993371 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1975). Cell death in the development of the lateral motor column of the chick embryo. J. Comp. Neurol. , 160, 535-46. PMID: 1123466 DOI.
Skoff RP & Hamburger V. (1974). Fine structure of dendritic and axonal growth cones in embryonic chick spinal cord. J. Comp. Neurol. , 153, 107-47. PMID: 4810722 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1963). Embryology. Science , 142, 1367. PMID: 17752414 DOI.
HAMBURGER V. (1958). Regression versus peripheral control of differentiation in motor hypoplasia. Am. J. Anat. , 102, 365-409. PMID: 13617221 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1945). BIOLOGY IN THE PREMEDICAL CURRICULUM. Science , 102, 511-3. PMID: 17750726 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1929). . Wilhelm Roux Arch Entwickl Mech Org , 119, 47-99. PMID: 28353841 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1928). . Wilhelm Roux Arch Entwickl Mech Org , 114, 272-363. PMID: 28354247 DOI.
Hamburger V. (1925). . Wilhelm Roux Arch Entwickl Mech Org , 105, 149-201. PMID: 28353770 DOI.
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