Word: conklin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Conklin is primarily an embryologist, whose chief scientific work was done with such material as the eggs of the sea squirt and of a little mollusc named Crepidula. But he got his start in science before extreme specialization was as fashionable as it is today. So he is something of a jack-of-all-biology. Perhaps for the same reason he has the kind of extra-level head which men who are not specialists sometimes have. No dodo, despite his amiable nature, he has a merry tongue which articulates scientific problems with what the contemporaries of his younger days called...
Early in the 20th Century, peering through his microscope at the eggs of little marine animals called sea squirts (a diagram of a sea squirt egg appears beside him on TIME'S cover), Dr. Conklin upset this notion. He found differentiated tissue regions which later gave rise to the outer skin, the middle skin, the inner skin and the main trunk of the nervous system-carried the origin of organs all the wayback...
...Conklin proved his point by putting sea squirt embryos into centrifuges (whirling machines) and literally turning them inside out. Result: he developed embryo sea squirts with eyes in their innards and spinal cords outside their skins...
Acquired Characteristics. In 1896 Conklin got into another big scientific row. He was asked to take part in a Philadelphia symposium on "The Factors of Organic Evolution." He was then only 33 and rather bashful about appearing before his elders, but, being urged, he accepted. He was pitted in debate against a booming bigwig, Professor Edward Drinker Cope of University of Pennsylvania, who advanced the Lamarckian view that acquired characteristics (e.g., muscular development or manual skill) can be inherited. Conklin defended the opposite view, boldly stated that inherited characteristics are determined solely by the germ plasm. In the course...
...Darwin Divide. Many scientists engaged in the controversy between biology and Mrs. Grundy over Darwin. Conklin was one of the few to do so who had a background of youthful religious fervor. He plumped for Darwinism early, tried to show reasonable Christians that there was no threat from evolutionary doctrine to a practical religion based on Faith, Hope & Charity and the Golden Rule. (Today his religion is a sort of altruistic, pantheistic idealism.) His feeling for religion did not cause him to spare his opponents a crack...