Medicine: New Heads for Old Tails

High sign that scientists as a group are now more interested in life than in atoms occurred at the annual convention of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington last week. The plurality of reports dealt with biology. And the one which attracted most attention was Amherst’s Embryologist Otto Schotte’s tale of growing heads on the tails of tadpoles.

The tail of a decaudated tadpole regenerates. In such fast growing tissue, Dr. Schotte implanted eye cups from hatching frog eggs. The embryonic eyes induced the tail tissue to develop an eye. That eye induced growth of an upper head, which in turn induced growth of a mouth and lower head. The heads on the tails of Schotte tadpoles were not perfect. Nonetheless they demonstrated the capacity of embryonic cells to control their own development, and hinted at a future method of seeding injuries in human beings.