Abstract
This history of a statement attributed to the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert exemplifies the making and uses of quotations in recent science. Wolpert's dictum, 'It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life', was produced in a series of international shifts of medium and scale. It originated in his vivid declaration in conversation with a non-specialist at a workshop dinner, gained its canonical form in a colleague's monograph, and was amplified as a quotation on a poster derived from an undergraduate project. Although it drew on Wolpert's authority and he accepted his authorship, it thus represents a collective sifting of earlier claims for the significance of prenatal existence through the values of 1980s developmental biology. Juxtaposing a technical term with major life events has let teachers engage students, and researchers entice journalists, while sharing an in-joke that came to mark community identity. Serious applications include arguing for an extension of the fourteen-day limit on human-embryo research. On this evidence, quotations have been kept busy addressing every audience of specialized knowledge.
Highlights
For an enterprise dedicated to innovation, science is surprisingly rich in quotations
This history of a statement attributed to the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert exemplifies the making and uses of quotations in recent science
When the influential developmental biologist, author and broadcaster Lewis Wolpert died in January 2021, colleagues and obituarists remembered his aphorism, ‘It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life.’[1]. This claim has been reproduced so often since 1983 that it may be ‘the most famous quotation in embryology after William Harvey’s “Ex ovo omnia”’ (Everything from an egg).[2]
Summary
While ‘a necessity for historians’, quotation has been painted as a ‘luxury’ for scientists.[3]. Showing how the maxim was made, as so often, in a series of changes of medium and scale will explain how Wolpert was credited with a collaborative achievement It all began with a move from a workshop conversation in Antwerp in 1979, where he launched the quip, to a British colleague’s book, which added the reference to other life events; it continued with a shift from that book to a poster from an undergraduate project in Florida, which recognized the quotation as such. Haeckel’s theory that a gastrula-like animal, or gastraea, represented the common ancestor of all multicellular animals was contested, but in time embryologists accepted that birds and mammals gastrulate, too Despite his best efforts, neither ‘gastrula’ nor ‘gastrulation’ became household words.[19]. There follows from it the clear recognition that man, like all other complex animals [Gewebthiere], has received all personal
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