What Makes an Experiment Beautiful?

Nature, mysterious in day’s clear light, lets none remove her veil, and what she won’t discover to your understanding you can’t extort from her with levers and with screws.1 Goethe, Faust I, lines 672–675 Only about the size of a pinhead, the early amphibian embryo undergoes rapid cell divisions immediately after fertilization. By the time this cellular sphere comprises a few thousand cells, the embryo begins to fold inward. The point at which it does so marks the dimple-like dorsal lip of the blastopore — the opening of the embryo’s newly forming central cavity. In the early 1920s, Hilde Pröscholdt, a talented graduate student under the supervision of Hans Spemann at the Zoological Institute in Freiburg, Germany, had observed this “gastrulation” process hundreds of times under her microscope. Spemann’s own earlier experiments identified that the dorsal lip might be necessary for the embryo’s development, but how exactly it exerted its influence was unknown. Hilde Pröscholdt developed

Nature, mysterious in day’s clear light, lets none remove her veil, and what she won’t discover to your understanding you can’t extort from her with levers and with screws.1 Goethe, Faust I, lines 672–675 Only about the size of a pinhead, the early amphibian embryo undergoes rapid cell divisions immediately after fertilization. By the time this cellular sphere comprises a few thousand cells, the embryo begins to fold inward. The point at which it does so marks the dimple-like dorsal lip of the blastopore — the opening of the embryo’s newly forming central cavity. In the early 1920s, Hilde Prös