Hilde Mangold, co-discoverer of the organizer.

Abstract

This personal narrative by Viktor Hamburger occupies a special place among the papers published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Dealing with events of sixty years ago, it provides an invaluable glimpse of the scientific and personal lives of the group of budding young investigators in the laboratory of Hans Spemann in Freiburg. The central figure is Hilde Proescholdt, later Hilde Mangold, who for her doctoral dissertation executed the crucial experiments that demonstrated the nature and location of the organizer that induces the pattern of embryonic differentiation. The resulting paper by Spemann and Hilde Mangold led to Spemann's Nobel Prize in 1935; but Mangold had died long before that, in a tragic accident. This account recalls the life and character of a gifted young woman who should not be forgotten. It is to be read also as a part of the autobiography of Viktor Hamburger, one of the supreme developmental biologists of our time. He was born in 1900, in Landeshut, Silesia then a part of Germany, now a part of Poland. Later, to our good fortune, he settled in the United States. This is not the place for a discussion of his great achievements in neuroembryology, and in gene action during development, at the University of Chicago and later at Washington University in St. Louis. Here he provides a vivid account of what life was like for an eager group of young scientists, in Freiburg and in the beautiful surrounding country of the Black Forest and the Rhine, during the years of hardship that followed the First World War. We hope to hear more from Professor Hamburger, in continuation of this narrative, but in any case this account enriches our appreciation of an important time in the history of modern biology.'