When Marianne Bronner first learned about the neural crest—a group of cells that form early in embryonic development and give rise to most of the peripheral nervous system and facial skeleton—she had an epiphany. “I just knew that that is what I wanted to study,” she says. Prior to her personal revelation, Bronner struggled. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” she says. She had earned a bachelor’s degree in biophysics from Brown University in 1975 and went to graduate school in the same field at Johns Hopkins University. “Since I had a degree in biophysics, I figured that I should go to graduate school in biophysics,” Bronner explains. But when she took a developmental biology course at Hopkins, she “fell in love.”
In that course, Bronner learned about Nicole Le Douarin’s pioneering work, starting in 1969, combining embryonic quail and chick cells to study their ...
