Armand marie leroi biography examples

THE NATURE OF NORMAL HUMAN VARIETY

The question that interests me, as it does so many other people, is how to go about making a human being. It's a very difficult problem. Roughly what it boils down to is this: We have 30,000 genes or so. It's often said that the genome is something in the nature of a book. It has words, a grammar, a syntax, and of course those words have meaning. The only problem is that we don't know actually what that meaning is. So the question is, how do we decipher that? And turning that question around, looking at it from the point of the human body, what do those genes mean to the construction of the human body?

Of course, I myself don't actually work on humans. They're just too inconvenient. I work on worms. This worm is Caenorhabditis elegans, for which Brenner, Sulston, and Horvitz just won the Nobel Prize. And the reason why I and a thousand other scientists work on this worm is that, for all of their marvelous properties, it's easy to keep thousands of them in petri dishes, and it's very easy to find mutants. And that's the critical thing. We find mutants that interrupt particular genes, and that tells us what those genes do and what they mean to the body of a worm.

Developmental biologists have been doing this for a long time—once a field has its Nobel, you can be sure it's reasonably mature. What people haven't really done, however, is to do this for the human body. The reason is obvious: you just can't go out and generate mutants in humans. For humans you've got to go out and find those mutants. But they're out there. There are thousands upon thousands of mutants out there—no, more, millions—no, actually billions. This is because we are all mutants. That's one thing you don't expect but which happens to be statistically true. Each of us carries mutations that interrupt particular genes. So if you can just find who is a mutant for a particular gene, and examine what they look like, you ca

So who is the greatest biologist of all time? Good question. For most people it's got to be Darwin. I mean, Darwin is top dog, numero uno. He told us about evolution, he convinced us that evolution happened, and he gave us an explanation for it. I mean, there just wouldn't seem to be any competition. Okay, fine, well you might then say: Mendel. Mendel discovers transmission genetics, and that was pretty good. And I suppose then you have to go pretty far down the list to come to people like Watson and Crick, who just discovered the structure of DNA, which is just a bit of structural biology, really, a bit of biochemistry.

Okay, but who is the real top dog? For me, the answer is absolutely clear. It's Aristotle. And it's a surprising answer because even though I suppose some biologists might know, should they happen to remember their first year textbooks, that Aristotle was the Father of Biology, they would still say, “well, yes, but he got everything wrong." And that, I think, is a canard. The thing about Aristotle - and this is why I love him - is that his thought was is so systematic, so penetrating, so vast, so strange – and yet he's undeniably a scientist.

Aristotle was a student of Plato's.  Around the year 347/8 BC, when he was in his late 30s, he left Athens and went to the Island of Lesvos. He scooted a bit along the Aegean Coast, and as he did so picked up a wife. We believe that she was 18 years old. We don't entirely know that for sure. We know her name was Pythias. We think she was very young because he says the best age for a man to marry is 37, the best age for a woman to marry is 18, and given that we know that Aristotle was 37 when he married, we infer that his wife was 18. He was a great man for rationalizing things.

In any event, he's 37, he's left Athens.  He’s done this, incidentally, after Plato's death, and one explanation for why he left was that he’s the brightest guy in the academy, clear

PERSONAL: Born July 16, 1964, in Wellington, New Zealand. Education: Dalhousie University, B.Sc., 1989; University of California at Irvine, Ph.D., 1993; postdoctoral study at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Offıce— Department of Biological Sciences, Silwood Park Campus, Imperial College, London, Ascot, Berkshire SLG 7PY, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Imperial College, London, London, England, lecturer, 1996-2001, reader in evolutionary developmental biology, 2001—.

WRITINGS:

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to academic journals, including Bioinformatics, Genetics, Evolution and Development, American Naturalist, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; also contributor of book reviews to London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. Member of editorial board, Evolution and Development.

ADAPTATIONS: Mutants was adapted as a three-part television series by the British Broadcasting Corporation.

SIDELIGHTS: Armand Marie Leroi is a developmental biologist who has studied the molecular and genetic aspects of biological development from nematode worms to humans. In his first book, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, he examines the biology behind people born with deformities in light of modern knowledge concerning the molecular basis of human development. His ultimate goal, however, is to delineate the molecular principles that form the foundations of all human development.

Leroi's approach is to illustrate the molecular basis of development through historical anecdotes and references, including the stories of real people and mythic legends such as the Cyclops. For example, his chapters focusing on the development of overall body form includes stories about conjoined twins that illustrate humans' three basic tissue types and how they are developed. In another

Christmas is a time for reading, so in addition to Rolt’s Brunel biography I have also read “Mutants: On the form, varieties & errors of the human body” by Armand Marie Leroi.

This is a story of developmental biology told through the medium of mutants, people for whom development doesn’t go quite to standard plan.

The book runs through a sequence of distinct mutations: Siamese twinning, deformities to arms and legs, skeletal defects, dwarfs and giants, various sexual variations, albinism and hairiness, and finally ageing. His approach does not revel in the freak show aspects of human mutants rather makes a brief reference to the historical recognition of such mutations and uses this as a jumping off point for discussion of modern biological understanding.

Mutations have long been an area for scientific study because it was realised that studying malfunction would provide clues to the mechanisms of normal development.

The marvel of developmental biology is that it is a method of construction completely at odds to the human way of making complex devices. Rather than a complex entity assembling pieces to a plan, biology starts with an instruction set which builds order out of chaos with no external help. It is self-organisation, creation from (nearly) nothing with no supporting infrastructure. There are non-biological self-organising systems and we make use of some of them industrially, but there is nothing that matches the complexity, the heterogeneity that biology can achieve.

The fundamentals of development biology are genes coding for proteins that tell you where you are in the developing embryo and trigger growth or differentiation on that basis i.e. “I find myself in the presence of proteins A, B, and C at these particular concentrations, therefore I must make a leg”. As an example, the proteins noggin and bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4) define the top and bottom of the growing embryo – in simp