Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
Authors: Neil Shubin
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mimicked by a variety of other means. For example, take a chicken embryo and dab a little vitamin A on its limb bud, or simply inject vitamin A into the egg, and let the embryo develop. If you supply the vitamin A at the right concentration and at the right stage, you’ll get the same mirror-image duplication that Gasseling, Saunders, and Zwilling got from the grafting experiments. This patch of tissue was named the zone of polarizing activity (ZPA). Essentially, the ZPA is a patch of tissue that causes the pinky side to be different from the thumb side. Obviously chicks do not have a pinky and a thumb. The terminology we use is to number the digits, with our pinky corresponding to digit five of other animals and our thumb corresponding to digit one.
Moving a little patch of tissue called the ZPA causes the fingers to be duplicated.
The ZPA drew interest because it appeared, in some way, to control the formation of fingers and toes. But how? Some people believed that the cells in the ZPA made a molecule that then spread across the limb to instruct cells to make different fingers. The key proposal was that it was the concentration of this unnamed molecule that was the important factor. In areas close to the ZPA, where there is a high concentration of this molecule, cells would respond by making a pinky. In the opposite side of the developing hand, farther from the ZPA so that the molecule was more diffused, the cells would respond by making a thumb. Cells in the middle would each respond according to the concentration of this molecule to make the second, third, and fourth fingers.
This concentration-dependent idea could be tested. In 1979, Denis Summerbell placed an extremely small piece of foil between the ZPA patch and the rest of the limb. The idea was to use this barrier to prevent any kind of molecule from diffusing from the ZPA to the other side. Summerbell studied what happened to the cells on each side of the barrier. Cells on the ZPA side formed digits. Cells on the opposite side often did not form digits; if they did, the digits were badly malformed. The conclusion was obvious. Something was emanating from the ZPA that controlled how the digits formed and what they looked like. To identify that something, researchers needed to look at DNA.
THE DNA RECIPE
That project was left to a new generation of scientists. Not until the 1990s, when new molecular techniques became available, was the genetic control for the ZPA’s operation unraveled.
A major breakthrough happened in 1993, when Cliff Tabin’s laboratory at Harvard started hunting for the genes that control the ZPA. Their prey was the molecular mechanisms that gave the ZPA its ability to make our pinky different from our thumb. By the time his group started to work in the early 1990s, a number of experiments like the ones I’ve described had led us to believe that some sort of molecule caused the whole thing. This was a grand theory, but nobody knew what this molecule was. People would propose one molecule after another, only to find that none was up to the job. Finally, the Tabin lab came up with a novel notion, and one very relevant to the theme of this book. Look to flies for the answer.
Genetic experiments in the 1980s had revealed the wonderful pattern of gene activity that sculpts the body of a fly from a single-celled egg. The body of a fruit fly is organized from front to back, with the head at the front and the wings at the back. Whole batteries of genes are turned on and off during fly development, and this pattern of gene activity serves to demarcate the different regions of the fly.
Tabin didn’t know it at the time, but two other laboratories—those of Andy MacMahon and Phil Ingham—had already come up with the same general idea independently. What emerged was a remarkably successful collaboration among three different lab groups. One of the fly genes caught the attention of Tabin, McMahon, and Ingham. They noted that this
Moving a little patch of tissue called the ZPA causes the fingers to be duplicated.
The ZPA drew interest because it appeared, in some way, to control the formation of fingers and toes. But how? Some people believed that the cells in the ZPA made a molecule that then spread across the limb to instruct cells to make different fingers. The key proposal was that it was the concentration of this unnamed molecule that was the important factor. In areas close to the ZPA, where there is a high concentration of this molecule, cells would respond by making a pinky. In the opposite side of the developing hand, farther from the ZPA so that the molecule was more diffused, the cells would respond by making a thumb. Cells in the middle would each respond according to the concentration of this molecule to make the second, third, and fourth fingers.
This concentration-dependent idea could be tested. In 1979, Denis Summerbell placed an extremely small piece of foil between the ZPA patch and the rest of the limb. The idea was to use this barrier to prevent any kind of molecule from diffusing from the ZPA to the other side. Summerbell studied what happened to the cells on each side of the barrier. Cells on the ZPA side formed digits. Cells on the opposite side often did not form digits; if they did, the digits were badly malformed. The conclusion was obvious. Something was emanating from the ZPA that controlled how the digits formed and what they looked like. To identify that something, researchers needed to look at DNA.
THE DNA RECIPE
That project was left to a new generation of scientists. Not until the 1990s, when new molecular techniques became available, was the genetic control for the ZPA’s operation unraveled.
A major breakthrough happened in 1993, when Cliff Tabin’s laboratory at Harvard started hunting for the genes that control the ZPA. Their prey was the molecular mechanisms that gave the ZPA its ability to make our pinky different from our thumb. By the time his group started to work in the early 1990s, a number of experiments like the ones I’ve described had led us to believe that some sort of molecule caused the whole thing. This was a grand theory, but nobody knew what this molecule was. People would propose one molecule after another, only to find that none was up to the job. Finally, the Tabin lab came up with a novel notion, and one very relevant to the theme of this book. Look to flies for the answer.
Genetic experiments in the 1980s had revealed the wonderful pattern of gene activity that sculpts the body of a fly from a single-celled egg. The body of a fruit fly is organized from front to back, with the head at the front and the wings at the back. Whole batteries of genes are turned on and off during fly development, and this pattern of gene activity serves to demarcate the different regions of the fly.
Tabin didn’t know it at the time, but two other laboratories—those of Andy MacMahon and Phil Ingham—had already come up with the same general idea independently. What emerged was a remarkably successful collaboration among three different lab groups. One of the fly genes caught the attention of Tabin, McMahon, and Ingham. They noted that this
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