The field of developmental biology has expanded in recent years to cover a huge range of topics and ideologies, a journey that has taken it into the central well-spring of modern biological science. The field is no longer the domain of the individualist, interested in the pattern and growth of a few model systems and the genes that controls these events. Rather, the issues that so beguiled pioneering developmental biologists have now become crucial to the understanding of such disparate fields as cancer biology, cloning and stem cell totipotency. This situation has arisen because of the fact that the signal transduction pathways and genes that have been defined in model developmental systems have now been shown to regulate many aspects of biology,including those that directly impinge on the issues of human health.
This new `broad church' of developmental biologists was certainly in evidence at this year's Spring meeting of the...
