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“Embryology is a fascinating area, my research into which
has allowed me to perfect a technique that has revealed very
interesting possibilities. I had the idea of creating hybrids.
I wanted to know what a particular area of an embryo would become
while developing. It needed to be marked. I took it, in an early
stage of development, from a chicken embryo, replacing it with
the equivalent from a quail embryo – I had noticed that
the nuclei of their cells were different. This allowed me to
follow the cells from the graft even if they dispersed and multiplied
widely. I have a wonderful memory of the day on which I observed
the first results of this experiment; it was spectacular to see
what the few cells I had grafted had become. They belonged to
a structure of the embryo called the Neural Crest. The cells
of the neural crest are actual stem cells.
Awareness
in biology of the developments made in the last decades
has, in many areas, opened doors that would have been unthinkable
before, especially in relation to medically assisted procreation
(MAP) which has developed a great deal in recent years and which
allows sterile couples to conceive. We have even shown that it
is possible to use a woman simply as an incubator for a child
that started its life in a test tube.
These techniques, while posing ethical problems that should not
be ignored, open new perspectives and take on a considerable
social importance. They are part of the many problems posed by
scientific progress that we debate at the Académie des
Sciences and on which we have had to advise the government.” |
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