Secret of chimeras (The)

Nicole Le Douarin, CNRS Gold Medal winner in 1986 and the inventor of the first animal chimeras, quail-chickens, describes the history of the process of embryo marking, which allows the monitoring of cellular diversification throughout its development.
This method, applied to the neural crest of the chicken embryo, enabled her to show that the bones of the facial structure are formed from the region that is also primarily responsible for the formation of the skin and nervous system. Thirty years of constant improvement of the quail-chicken method have resulted today in increasingly refined procedures, by which genes can be introduced into precisely defined areas of the embryo.