Aneuploidy disrupts embryogenesis : Theodor Boveri's analysis of sea urchin dispermy.

Abstract

The title of this Essay embodies an anachronism, because the term aneuploidy was not coined until several years after Theodor Boveri’s death. But that term would be meaningless if all chromosomes were functionally equivalent, and consequently no such term existed at the time when Boveri demonstrated the so-called individuality of chromosomes for the first time, by analysing dispermy in sea urchins. It is his exploitation of this “experiment of Nature” and its developmental implications that we shall now discuss, returning thereby from the role of the egg cytoplasm in development (see the previous Essay) to the roles that the nucleus, and more specifically the chromosomes, play. The work reviewed in this Essay and the next was, according to E.B. Wilson (1918, p. 74/75), Boveri’s “crowning achievement, whether in respect to excellence of method or importance of result.”