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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Boris Ephrussi and the Synthesis of Genetics and Embryology

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The career of Boris Ephrussi (1901–1979) presents a series of fascinating perspectives on the intellectual and sociological difficulties that plagued those who wished to reconcile genetics and embryology during the middle of this century (2–8). Ephrussi was born in a suburb of Moscow, but spent much of his working career in France, with important periods in the United States. He made major contributions to the rapprochement between genetics and developmental biology. His work, which we believe has been undervalued both by historians of biology and by subsequent generations of biologists, is worth studying for at least three reasons: 1. Throughout his long career, he sought an adequate causal analysis of differentiation and development. Relatively early, he saw the need to accomplish this task by uniting the findings of genetics with those of embryology. To this end, he employed a great variety of experimental organisms and techniques and explored numerous conceptual and theoretical models. Accordingly, the study of his work provides considerable insight into the shifts in theory and technique that affected various attempts to come to grips with the problems of differentiation, development, and morphogenesis while maintaining consistency—and serious contact—with genetics. 2. Because he worked in both European and American settings and maintained extremely rich contacts with workers in numerous disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic, his career sheds light on the various integrative efforts—and tensions—that characterize the relationship between embryology and genetics during the middle of the century. He was intellectually central to a number of key debates, a proponent of an integrative view of the organism that, at times, left him at odds with his colleagues in genetics, a prime mover in the institutionalization of genetics in France, and closely involved with institutional developments elsewhere that reconfigured the map of biology. 3. Ephrussi and his co-workers pioneered a variety of experimental approaches to the analysis of the roles of nuclear and cytoplasmic factors in differentiation. They helped shape the transition from Mendelian transmission genetics to molecular genetics and influenced the transition from embryology to developmental biology.