Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
A second intellectual practice that Boveri employed, and again one that is very
nearly impossible or at the very least impractical today, was not to rush to publish.
But, rather to contemplate, incubating the results, sometimes for years before a
manuscript that was often a masterpiece on the subject resulted. Key to his
intellectual process was to take the time to refine a more comprehensive under-
standing through further experimentation, and discussions with colleagues,
exchange of letters and lectures on the topic, and simply to ponder. Just try and
explain this method of scientific discovery to your Department Chair or Dean of
Research when she asks not 'what have you done', but 'what have you done
lately'? One may argue that Web-based literature forums and databases supplant
the need for incubation because they make all current and past scientific thought
available to the present day investigator at the click of a mouse. Undoubtedly,
digital access has greatly improved the availability of information. Nonetheless, it
is all too common to witness a blind spot in citations of important and often key
studies in an area because a keyword search failed to pick up a paper that used an
outmoded term for a now widely known protein or process. Lost keywords for
many proteins that now carry familiar names were once referred to simply as a
molecular weight or by a descriptive property, such as the 55 kD protein, the
'colchicine-binding protein' or the 'calcium-dependent regulatory protein'.
If Boveri was so fortunate to live to see today's stunning developments in Cell
Biology he would surely be astounded by the depth of detail and progress in the
field, but if he used the practice of discovery that served him so well during his
career, we might see him standing on a corner carrying a cardboard sign that
reads… 'Will do Microscopy for Food'. We are the fortunate ones to have had his
shoulder to rest upon and to have the opportunity to rediscover in molecular detail
what he knew so well.
During the period and until the advent of modern methods in biology, progress
was not simply incremental, but included many discoveries that underlie our
current appreciation of centrioles and centrosomes. We must take a rather broad
view of the importance of these to include fundamental studies on cilia and fla-
gella, because, with the prescience of hindsight, we recognize that the functional
relevance of centrioles lies in their supporting role for ciliogenesis and as the
anchor for cilia and flagella, which was evident early on and particularly for sperm
of animals and lower plants. Flagella emanating from centrioles located at the
spindle poles of meiotic insect spermatocytes, the transformation of the blepha-
roplast in Equisetum to give rise to multiple flagellar bases during spermatogen-
esis, and the conversion of clusters of centrioles into basal bodies of ciliated
epithelia led Friedrich Meves, Mihaly Lenhossek, Louis Félix Henneguy, and
L.W. Sharp in particular, to solidify the concept that centrioles and basal bodies
are
interchangeable
and
indeed
one-in-the-same
organelle
(Henneguy
1897 ;
Lenhossék 1898 ; Meves 1900 ).
A second and still enigmatic role for centrosomes is that of organizing a
cytoplasmic spatial template. The earliest hint that centrosomes embody an
intrinsic structural template was seen in the giant replicating centrioles in the
spermatocyte of the hagfish Myxine, where the orthogonal relationship between
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