In the Company of Biologists: Celebrating the MBL Embryology Course

“Woods Hole is known as a place where imaginations can run wild, and students can encounter organisms that carry out development in ways that are both unfamiliar and thought-provoking” starts an article in Development celebrating the flourishing interactions between the MBL Embryology course and The Company of Biologists, a nonprofit publisher and organization dedicated to supporting and inspiring biologists worldwide.

Based in Cambridge, U.K., the Company of Biologists has interacted with the Embryology course since 1993 and supported it in a number of ways, including funding students, promoting the course on its community site, The Node, and fostering international connections.

They also sponsored a contest of Embryology course microscopy images from 2011 to 2017, a much-anticipated feature that many hope will return in the future. Readers voted on their favorites, and the winning image landed on the cover of Development, one of the organization’s journals.

“The Company of Biologists provides an almost unparalleled connection to the [biological] community, especially in Europe,” says MBL Director Nipam Patel, a longtime faculty member in the Embryology course, in the article.

Patel reaffirms that the diversity of embryos and organisms that the Embryology course offers to students is inspiring in itself, and adds, “I think the more important thing is that the course really gives the students a sense that they can do anything, and that they should be brave.”

This thought is echoed in a companion essay in this issue of Development, “Embryology 2024: A Summer Like No Other,” written by several students who took the course. They explored “endless forms most beautiful,” conducted classic and cutting-edge experiments, and “had full autonomy to chase our interests…Every idea was encouraged, and although many, many experiments failed, we lived up to the MBL's (unofficial) motto to ‘study nature, not books’.”

The essay vividly conveys the excitement of the course, which the students call “a life-changing experience, just as it presumably has been for the 129 generations of students who came before us. Each of us left with a renewed enthusiasm for science and developmental biology, and a network of life-long friendships. We would recommend the Embryology Course to any embryologist, at any stage of development.”

The Embryology course is currently co-directed by Tatjana Piotrowski of the Stowers Institute and Athula Wikramanayake of University of Miami.

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In addition to support from The Company of Biologists, The MBL Embryology Course is supported with funds and equipment provided by:

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Burroughs Wellcome Fund; March of Dimes; Society for Developmental Biology; Elsevier; Andor; Bitplane; Bruker; Carl Zeiss Microscopy; Chroma / 89 North; CrestOptics; CoolLED; Drummond Scientific; Flamingo – involv3d; Formlabs; Gene Tools; Hamamatsu; Hamilton Thorne; ibidi; Leica Microsystems; Molecular Instruments; Morishige; Nikon; OkoLabs; Olympus / Evident; ONI; RPMC lasers – Oxxius; Spirochrome; Sutter Instruments; Thermofisher – EVOS; ThorLabs; Tokai Hit; Vortran Laser Technology; Yokogawa