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Views | Duration | ||
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31. Demonstrating chemotaxis in development | 29 | 02:20 | |
32. Wallowing in the developmental aspects of slime mold | 35 | 02:48 | |
33. I’m a 19th century biologist | 38 | 01:35 | |
34. Learning about high altitude physiology | 27 | 02:55 | |
35. Testing the effects of decompression | 23 | 01:56 | |
36. Conducting experiments while still in the army | 22 | 02:23 | |
37. Giving slime molds a name | 27 | 01:30 | |
38. Learning about the facts of life | 30 | 01:57 | |
39. Life was fun in Locust Valley | 35 | 04:56 | |
40. A typical adolescence | 48 | 00:39 |
Largely through the work of Paul Weiss, and it's wonderful work, on animal embryos - he was of the very strong opinion, and he liked to influence everybody else, including me, that chemotaxis was not something that you found in developing systems, but that it was what he called contact guidance, which it felt its way along. And although there was all… Anyhow that was the situation when I entered the battlefield. And so I tried to do all sorts of experiments, which would test this and I finally found one which I didn't have much faith in, but it turned out to be the answer. And that is that if you moved water around the central point of this aggregation that it carried something downstream which caused these amoebae downstream to orient up and crawl against it. And that kind of taxis is the same thing as if you have heat, if you had little heat spots. And so I had to look to be sure that it wasn't me. And I forget now exactly how we did it; it was a fairly simple experiment. And so the question that Paul Weiss had put before all of us was: a) did you have chemotaxis in development, yes; b) how can you demonstrate it so that you don't get a lot of arguments?
John Tyler Bonner (born in 1920) is an emeritus professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He is a pioneer in the use of cellular slime molds to understand evolution and development and is one of the world's leading experts on cellular slime molds. He says that his prime interests are in evolution and development and that he uses the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines. He has written several books on developmental biology and evolution, many scientific papers, and has produced a number of works in biology. He has led the way in making Dictyostelium discoideum a model organism central to examining some of the major questions in experimental biology.
Title: Demonstrating chemotaxis in development
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: Paul Weiss
Duration: 2 minutes, 20 seconds
Date story recorded: February 2016
Date story went live: 14 September 2016