Abstract
Aron Arthur Moscona (1921–2009) was an Israeli-American developmental biologist whose name is associated with research on cell interactions during embryonic development. His appearance on the international scene dates back to a paper published in 1952, while he was working, together with his wife Haya Sobel Moscona, at the Strangeways Research Laboratory of Cambridge. Together they demonstrated that cells from previously dissociated chick tissues undergo histiotypical and organotypical aggregation in vitro. From 1952 to 1997, Moscona focused his research on cell recognition mechanisms, ultimately demonstrating the role of transmembrane proteins in cellular adhesiveness, tissue segregation, and organ tridimensional assemblage during development. However, who was Aron Moscona before 1952 and what brought him to developmental biology? A Polish Jew who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933, Moscona belonged to the first generation of biologists formed in the newly established Zoology Department of the Hebrew University. With a particular focus on the Israeli context, the paper reconstructs the evolution of Moscona’s scientific thought by emphasizing the cultural and experimental context of his training and early research at the Hebrew University. The aim is to investigate how local scientific traditions influenced Moscona’s eventual research as well as enabled the relevant experimental innovation he contributed to the field of developmental biology and pathology. The paper can be read both as a scientific biography of Aron Moscona and as a preliminary contribution to the historiography of embryology in the Mandatory Palestine/Israeli context.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
Access to unpublished administrative material was allowed by the Hebrew University Archive while access to unpublished scientific and private material was allowed by Prof. Anne Moscona, Aron and Malka Moscona’s daughter.
Code Availability
Not applicable.
Notes
Haya Sobel was an Israeli developmental endocrinologist. She married Aron Moscona in 1948 and, until their separation in 1953/1954, she signed administrative documents and scientific papers with her married name “Haya Moscona.” Her previous work was signed “Haya Horn,” mentioning the surname of her first husband, while later work is signed “Haya Sobel” (Sobel’s Personal File, Hebrew University Archive, Jerusalem; hereafter, Sobel, HUA). In this paper, we will refer to her by her maiden name “Haya Sobel.”
Aron Moscona was invited to participate in the 8th Congress of the International Society for Cell Biology, which took place in Leyden, The Netherlands in 1954. Then in 1956, during a postdoctoral period with Paul Weiss in his Developmental Biology Laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Moscona became acquainted with the American developmental biology and tissue culture communities, featuring as an invited lecturer in major scientific events (Aron Moscona, Curriculum vitae, November 1956, Moscona’s Personal File, Hebrew University Archive, Jerusalem; hereafter, Moscona, HUA).
Archival sources do not explicitly mention who was the principal investigator in each line of research.
See MacLeod and Nersessian (2016) for an up-to-date survey of philosophical literature on the role of interdisciplinary exchanges in the production of scientific knowledge.
See, for example, the Call for Papers for the 2019 Early Career Scholar Conference on Transcultural Knowledge of the European Society of the History of Sciences, held in Paris (http://eshs.org/ESHS-first-Young-Scholar-Conference.html).
Published and archival sources and obituaries report an incorrect date and place of birth, suggesting either that he was born in Haifa (Mandatory Palestine, today Israel) (Mahowald 2014; Easton 2009; Watts 2009; Jensen 2009) or that his birth was in 1922 (McNeil 2009; Questionnaire, July 20, 1950, Moscona, HUA). The ambiguity surrounding Moscona’s birth is not casual. As Moscona’s daughter recalls, he “was always extremely proud of being Israeli and always preferred to let it be understood or assumed by everyone … that he had been born in Haifa. It was only when I was about 9 and knew enough Hebrew to talk with his sister that she told me that he had been born in Poland! However he really did not ever want to quite admit this—he told me he never knew Polish, didn't remember Poland ….” The biographical misunderstandings might be due, she noted, to “his passion for being 100% Israeli” (Anne Moscona, personal communication). Concerning his date of birth, despite archival sources suggesting 1922 as the true date, Moscona’s birth certificate reports 1921, in agreement with most biographical and obituary sources.
https://www.reali.org.il/en/מאה-שנות-ריאלי/תולדות-בית-הספר/, Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, “History.”
Curriculum vitae, June 2, 1952, Moscona, HUA.
As in Harwood’s case study, there was also a minor positive reception of applied entomology among German scientists. After a trip to the United States in 1912, the entomologist Karl Leopold Escherich (1871–1951) conceived a plan to redesign applied entomology in Germany after the American model and in 1913 he cofounded the German Society for Applied Entomology (Schwerdtfeger 1973).
The Agricultural Experimental Station was founded in 1921 by the Jewish Agency under the supervision of the British Government. The Station was one of the first scientific institutions in Palestine, its goal being that of promoting intensive and mixed agriculture, both through experimental research in the field and the lab and with extension to local farmers. From 1922, the office and laboratories were moved to Tel Aviv while field work continued to be carried on the Judean coast and other areas of Mandate Palestine (Loebenstein and Putievsky 2007).
See Volcani (1919) for more information on the tight connection between the Zionist ideal and the role of agriculture for community settling.
Some years later, in 1932, the experimental station moved to Rehovot, first carrying on its program of experimental research and extension, and later, from 1942, also investing in teaching through the creation of an Institute for Agricultural Studies. In 1952, in the aftermath of the Independence War (1948) and the establishment of the new Ministry of Agriculture, the activities of the Rehovot station passed under governmental supervision: a new Faculty (College) of Agriculture was founded within the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where teaching was carried on while the Rehovot station continued to pursue agricultural research (Loebenstein and Putievsky 2007). In 1953–1954, Moscona, indeed, delivered his physiology classes to a class of agriculture, biology and bacteriology students.
https://www.bio.huji.ac.il/en/OurHistoryMainEn, The Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Science, “Our History.”
See Efron (2014) for a discourse analysis of 1920s-1940s rhetoric of the role of science and technology in shaping the image of a future state of Israel.
A clear testimony of this change in the popular perception of the social hierarchy is reflected in the kibbutz ideology. The kibbutz was born in the first decade of the twentieth century as a form of collective community entirely based on agriculture and was considered at the time one of the highest forms of citizenship. Traces of this “inversion of the social pyramid” are also provided by literature as, for example, in the novel Tarnegol Kaparot by Iraqi born Israeli writer Amir ([1984] 2015).
Teaching of embryology was introduced into the curriculum of the Zoology Department of the Hebrew University only between 1955 and 1957 (Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1957; Khaner 2017). In 1929, when Bodenheimer presented the first draft of a “possible Zoological section,” he mentioned the necessity for the University to hire a cytologist who would secure teaching in both embryology and histology (“Possible Zoological Section,” Zoology Department, Box 1929–1930, HUA). Still, in 1950, Georg Haas complained about the lack of academic personnel to satisfy the University's request to enlarge the list of courses offered by the Zoology Department, particularly through the addition of an embryology class (Georg Haas to Budget Committee, June 29, 1950, Sobel, HUA). The appointment of Hefzibah Eyal-Giladi, between 1955 and 1957, as chair of the first embryology course at the Hebrew University represented the first explicit move to promote embryology as an independent subject of study and research.
H. Fell, Progress Report on Aron Moscona, July 18, 1951, Moscona, HUA.
Curriculum vitae, June 2, 1952, Moscona, HUA. The written composition on Microtus could not be found in the archive or in any other official publication. We suggest that it was intended as an internal report on the research Moscona was carrying on as a student in Bodenheimer’s laboratory and was probably addressed to the panel of judges as an application for the Bialik scholarship, “established in 1935/36 by Sir Montague Burton, Leeds (England)” and open to “Regular and Research Students” (Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1939, p. 103).
In the 1940s it was already known that among the different types of cells making up the mammalian ovary, the cells of the ovarian cortex, forming part of the ovary stroma, secreted the hormones enabling ovulation. The same endocrine function was known to be played in male mammals by the interstitial cells of the testis (Logan 2017). The authors indeed checked the gonads for changes in the histology of their secreting tissue.
Anne Moscona, personal communication.
A letter from the administrative secretary states he was collaborating as “a payed assistant” for the duration of almost one year, from November 16, 1946 to September 30, 1947 (Moscona, HUA).
Theodor was the director of the Parasitology Department at the time Moscona was carrying on his research on the eggshell of Bacillus libanicus.
“The Department of Parasitology has devoted many years to the study of Leishmaniasis in all its aspects and particularly to transmission by sandflies” (“Fighting Disease in Israel” [brochure], Parasitology Department, Box 1952, HUA).
In the case of Bacillus libanicus, the capsule is missing so that the outermost part of the egg is represented by the chorion, itself divided in exochorion and endochorion, whose complex stratification is the result of secretion by neighboring follicular cells.
Hebrew University to British Consulate General, June 20, 1950, Moscona, HUA.
Moscona to Academic Secretary, February 1, 1950, Moscona, HUA.
Theodor to Academic Secretary, February 9, 1950, Moscona, HUA. In 1949, Moscona was working as a senior scholar in the Department of Parasitology, which Theodor directed.
Additional information concerning the nature of these urgent family issues is not mentioned in the archival sources. Moscona left Cambridge precipitously on January 2, 1951, due to a relative’s illness. Before leaving for Israel, he asked the American Friends of the Hebrew University whether his wife could convert a scholarship funded by the Ministry of Education of the Israeli Government to be spent in the United States into a scholarship at Cambridge funded by the Humanitarian Trust of the English Friends of the Hebrew University (Zander to Poznanski, January 3, 1951, Moscona, HUA). Although the conversion of Haya Sobel’s scholarship was not authorized, Moscona came back to Cambridge with Haya, having secured for her a “place in the same laboratory under Dr. Fell” and being able to financially support both of them through a “marriage allowance” (Zander to Poznanski, February 19, 1951, Moscona, HUA).
Moscona’s PhD thesis was also a taxonomic study of “The Anatomy and Histology of the Pancreas in Snakes and Lizards.” He compared different species of snakes and lizards and classified them according to the “general structure” of the pancreatic gland and its “anatomical and topological relationships with the spleen and the biliary system” (Moscona 1950d). Despite the primacy of the phylogenetic aim, emphasis on developmental processes permeates the whole dissertation since changes in pancreatic histology are correlated with the organism’s life cycle (particularly its reproductive period).
Karl Reich to Abraham Reifenberg, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, November 29, 1950, Sobel, HUA.
A similar case study on mutually supportive creative couples in science is that of geneticists Anna Rachel Young Whiting and Phineas Westcott Whiting (Richmond 2012). Both couples underwent periods of unemployment, when only one of the partners had a well-defined institutional status. In both cases, this disparity spawned supportive behavior, here intended as the sharing of both financial incomes and laboratory space. Moreover both Anna Rachel and Haya dropped their original plans of research, respectively, Anna Rachel’s interest in botany and Haya’s interest in the endocrinology of fish reproduction, in order to get closer to their husbands’ scientific interests. However, in drawing these connections, we should stress that Haya’s scientific career did not conflate with Aron’s. While Haya’s interest in organ culture was the result of her stay in Cambridge, initially motivated by Aron’s departure, in her later research she made use of this new organ-isolating technique with the aim of measuring the effects of hormones on organ development.
Despite the encouraging research context, it might be interesting to note that Fell’s evaluation of the (voluntary) research activity of Haya in Cambridge was positive but quite faint, when compared to the tones she used to describe Aron’s research. While Aron is described in the final report sent to the Hebrew University as “one of the best young research workers,” “a good ambassador for his university,” deserving “every encouragement,” Haya is described as “quite skilled in organ culture,” “an intelligent worker, and very keen and industrious” despite being, it is explicitly emphasized, “not of quite the same calibre as her husband, who is exceptional” (Fell’s reports on A. Moscona and H. Moscona, Moscona, HUA). While Haya’s experimental skillfulness was later emphasized also in the report of her research activity in Chicago, here both scientists are credited for their “excellent work,” for their “capacity to do imaginative research,” and for their “initiative” (Gersh to Rappaport, February 13, 1952, Sobel, HUA). These qualities are also mentioned in a 1953 letter signed by her supervisor at the Hebrew University, Karl Reich, who describes her work in UK and in the US as a “huge series of publications that bear witness to her scientific talent and original intuition” (Reich to Evenari, January 1, 1953, Sobel, HUA).
See Caianiello, Silvia. From Organ Culture to the New 3D Organotypic Cultures: Conceptual Pathways. Physis. Rivista Internazionale di Storia della Scienza, forthcoming.
Among the most influential members of the first generation of tissue culturists were Christian Champy and Justin Jolly in France; Albert Fischer in Denmark; Montrose Burrows, Margareth Leed Lewis, Warren Lewis, Leo Loeb, and Ross Harrison in the United States; Giuseppe Levi in Italy; Honor Fell, Edward Nevill Willmer, David Thomson, and John Thomson in England; Theodor Huzella in Hungary; and Nikolaij G. Chlopin in Russia. See Brauckmann (2006) for an institutional history of tissue and organ culture from the 1910s until the Second World War.
In 1962, on the occasion of Moscona’s speech at the symposium on “Specificity of Cells Differentiation and Interaction” held at Gatlinburg, Tennesse, the human geneticist Ernest H. Y. Chu raised the question of whether treatment with trypsin could be the main cause of the high rate of chromosome aberrations in cultured cells (see Chu’s discussion in Moscona 1962b, p. 77).
For a broader reflection on visual artefacts connected to the use of histochemical techniques, see Ariane Dröscher’s analysis of the discovery of the Golgi apparatus through the use of Camillo Golgi’s osmium silver impregnation (2014). See also Bechtel (1994) for a broader epistemological reflection on the reliability of experimental data in cell biology.
In 1944, Holtfreter obtained viable suspensions of amphibian cells through massive alkalinization of the culture medium (pH = 10) and subsequent stirring of the remaining clots through a glass needle (Steinberg and Gilbert 2004). Thus, Holtfreter’s method in 1944 was still based on physical alterations (both physical–chemical and mechanical).
“I met him [Holtfreter] first last year at his home in Rochester…. As a student I read his papers on disaggregation of amphibian embryo cells and on tissue affinities. They became a cornerstone of my work” (Moscona 1986, p. 77).
Posnanski to Cherrick, March 26, 1952; Posnanski to Cherrick, March 26, 1952, Sobel, HUA. Before leaving for Cambridge, Aron Moscona “signed an obligation to return to the university if required,” He was indeed a candidate for an assistantship in the Department of Zoology for the academic year 1951–1952. Haya Sobel was also expected to return to Israel, although not until February 7, 1952, after completing her training in the US.
The reason for this change is unknown. However, at the beginning of the 1950s, Carl Moore was seriously ill and would die only a few years later (in 1955) (Price 1974).
In particular, they served as spokesperson for the American Friends of the Hebrew University in front of the Temple Beth-El Jewish community of Chicago. Gersh to Rappaport, February 13, 1952, Sobel, HUA; Berkmann, Memorandum, May 16, 1952, Moscona, HUA.
Cherrick to Posnanski, March 11, 1952, Sobel, HUA; Berkman to Cherrick, May 16, 1952, attached to Lowenthal to Posnanski, May 28, 1952; Posnanski to Lowenthal, June 5, 1952, Moscona, HUA.
Despite Gersh’s mentioning the existence of “enough material for a paper that is publishable” and Sobel’s curriculum vita in 1953 including the preparation of a joint paper (with Moscona) entitled “Changes in the basement membrane of the limb bud during the development of the chick embryo,” the paper was never published.
Gersh to Committee of Research Grants, Ministry of Education, Moscona, HUA.
Aron and Haya refer to in vitro culture of organ rudiments as “the type of tissue culture promoting ‘organized growth’” (Sobel and Moscona A 1954, p. 503), borrowing David Thomson’s distinction between “unorganized” and “organized growth.” Another clue pointing to the influence of Thomson’s work on their research is the 1953 article on the role of bacterial cellulose (a substitute for the basement membrane) in limiting outgrowth phenomena in in vitro cultures (A. Moscona and H. Moscona 1953).
The administrative secretary to the economic secretary, December 1, 1952; Reich to Evenari, January 1, 1953, Sobel, HUA.
Sobel died prematurely of a serious illness in 1960, at a time when Peter Niewkoop, the director of the Hubrecht Laboratory in The Netherlands, was negotiating her discharge from teaching duties at the Hebrew University to take up a research position in Utrecht (Niewkoop to Sambursky, December 10, 1958; Niewkopp to Sambursky, January 14, 1959; Niewkoop to Alexander, January 16, 1960, Sobel, HUA).
Haas to Poznanski, April 24, 1954; Visa requests, August 10, 1954, Sobel, HUA.
Zander to Poznanski, March 15, 1954, Moscona, HUA.
Zander to Poznanski, June 6, 1954; Haas to Poznanski, May 24, 1954, Moscona, HUA.
Moscona to Poznanski, May 19, 1954, Moscona, HUA.
Samson Wright (1899–1956) was a British physiologist well-known for the publication of his textbook of Applied Physiology in 1927 and his interdisciplinary method of teaching basic physiology in connection with clinical medicine. As a Jew and a convinced Zionist, Wright actively supported the Hebrew University, being part of the University Board of Governors and of the association of the British Friends of the Hebrew University. He “was strongly in favor” of a grant awarded to Moscona, possibly for him to import his teaching methods to the Hebrew University (Zander to Poznanski, June 3, 1954, Moscona, HUA).
We might be tempted to conflate the term “mechanical support” into the more recent concept of “mechanical scaffold” or the concept of a biophysically and biochemically tailored micro-environment. Indeed, recently the same bacterial cellulose from Acetobacter xylinum, whose first introduction in tissue culture is due to Aron and Haya in 1953, has gained a new wave of attention in tissue engineering. Bacterial cellulose is today proposed as a most convenient scaffold material to regenerate damaged articular cartilage (Svensson et al. 2005). Aron and Haya, however, do not explicitly address the reason why these cellulose disks would constrain proliferative processes by providing a mechanical support for cellular multiplication (and, more generally, to tissue organization and organ arrangement). In 1953, they probably interpreted this constraining action in still negative terms: the cellulose membrane was introduced to avoid major mechanical manipulations of the explants and thus was mainly conceived as instrumental to an improvement of the hygiene of the explant.
Ross Harrison’s use of an adaptation of the hanging drop technique for the study of cell differentiation and tissue growth was also an interdisciplinary loan from bacteriology (Maienschein 1991).
Certificate of divorce, May 12, 1954 (Anne Moscona, personal correspondence).
According to Web of Science, it was only cited 7 times from 1955 to today.
Hoffman to the American Embassy, August 8, 1955, Moscona, HUA.
Marriage certificate, July 7, 1955 (Anne Moscona, personal communication). Hereafter, we refer to Malka Kempinski by her married name Malka Moscona, which is how she signed most of her scientific publications.
When in New York, in 1956, Malka was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at the Memorial Hospital and Sloan Kettering Institute for cancer research, working with the oncologist David Aryeh Karnovsky (Anne Moscona, personal communication).
Moscona to Wertheimer, July 3, 1955, Moscona, HUA.
The 1956 Decennial Review Conference on Tissue Culture was the second of four conferences held by the Tissue Culture Association to take stock of progress in tissue culture research. Compared to the first meeting, held in Hershey, Pennsylvania a decade earlier and hosting only a small delegation of 15 scientists, the community of tissue culturists had dramatically increased in size, while the use of tissue culture methodology had spread to countries like Israel or India where it had not existed in 1946 (Cleaves 1957).
The first two letters are not included in Moscona’s personal folder but only mentioned in his correspondence. The third letter was addressed to Wertheimer (Dean of the Faculty of Medicine) but also copied and sent to Dvoretzky (Dean of the Faculty of Science), Evenari (Professor of Botany at the Faculty of Science), and Magnes (Head of the Physiology Department at the Faculty of Medicine).
Sobel to Dvorezky, December 24, 1956, Sobel, HUA.
Etienne Wolff to Michael Evenari, September 30, 1957, Moscona, HUA.
Prywes to Wolff, October 23, 1957, Moscona, HUA. Translations from the original French are mine.
Anne Moscona, personal communication.
In 1966–1967, Moscona was Visiting Research Professor of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR). He joined Giuseppe Giudice and Vincenzo Mutolo in the Laboratory of Comparative Anatomy of University of Palermo and the Research Unit for Molecular Embryology of the CNR. They worked together on the role of cell interactions in rRNA synthesis in sea urchin. Probably in that same occasion, Malka Moscona spent a six months research stay at Monroy’s Laboratory where she collaborated with Alberto Monroy, who was at that time the director of the Laboratory of Comparative Anatomy of the University of Palermo.
Monroy to Ravin, April 3, 1978, Monroy’s collection, Archive of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples, Italy.
To reconstruct the “invisible story” of Moscona’s early training and research, we have made use of a heterogeneous pool of sources such as published scientific primary sources, historiographical secondary sources, archive based gray literature, and personal correspondence with Anne Moscona, the daughter of Malka and Aron Moscona, currently Professor of Pediatrics, Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology of Columbia University, New York.
References
Abir-am, Pnina, Helena M. Pycior, and Nancy G. Slack, eds. 1996. Creative Couples in the Sciences. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Agutter, Paul S., P. Colm Malone, and Denys N. Wheatley. 2000. Diffusion Theory in Biology: A Relic of Mechanistic Materialism. Journal of the History of Biology 33: 71–111.
Amir, Eli. (1984) 2015. E’ questa la terra promessa. Firenze: Giuntina.
Andrewartha, Herbert G., and L. Charles Birch. 1973. The History of Insect Ecology. In History of Entomology, ed. Ray F. Smith, Thomas E. Mittler, and Carroll N. Smith, 229–266. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews Inc.
Aschner, Manfred, and Shlomo Hestrin. 1946. Fibrillar Structure of Cellulose of Bacterial and Animal Origin. Nature 157: 659.
Baker, Edward. 2015. The Worldwide Status of Phasmids (Insecta: Phasmida) as Pests of Agriculture and Forestry, with a Generalized Theory of Phasmid Outbreaks. Agriculture & Food Security 4: 22.
Bechtel, William. 1994. Deciding on the Data: Epistemological Problems Surrounding Instruments and Research Techniques in Cell Biology. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994: 167–178.
Bechtel, William, and Adele Abrahamsen. 2007. In Search of Mitochondrial Mechanisms: Interfield Excursions between Cell Biology and Biochemistry. Journal of the History of Biology 40: 1–33.
Bodenheimer, Friedrich S. 1938. Problems in Animal Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bodenheimer, Friedrich S. 1958. Dynamic Anatomy. A New Aspect of an Old Science. Niv Harofeh 137–140 (in Hebrew).
Bodenheimer, Friedrich S. 1959. A Biologist in Israel. A Book of Reminiscences. Jerusalem: Biological Studies Publishers.
Bodenheimer, Friedrich S., and Felix Sulman. 1946. The Estrous Cycle of Microtus guentheri D. and A. and Its Ecological Implications. Ecology 27 (3): 255–256.
Borghese, Elio. 1955. Lo sviluppo di organi embrionali isolati. Monitore Zoologico Italiano. Supplemento 63: 50–138.
Brauckmann, Sabine. 2006. Networks of Tissue Knowledge, 1910–1960. Bulletin D’histoire Et D’epistémologie Des Sciences De La Vie 13 (1): 33–52.
Chalkley, Harold W. 1945. Quantitative Relation between the Number of Organized Centers and Tissue Volume in Regenerating Masses of Minced Body Sections of Hydra. Journal of National Cancer Institute 6: 191–195.
Chambers, Robert. 1940. The Relation of Extraneous Coats to the Organization and Permeability of Cell Membranes. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia for Quantitative Biology 8: 144–153.
Cleaves, Haskell. 1957. Conference on Tissue Culture. Science Meeting and Societies 125 (3236): 30–32.
Darden, Lindley, and Nancy Maull. 1977. Interfield Theories. Philosophy of Science 44: 43–64.
De Morgan Walter, C., and G. Harold Drew. 1914. A Study of the Restitution Masses Formed by the Dissociated Cells of the Hydroids Antennularia ramosa and A. antennina. Journal of the Marine Biology Association UK 10: 440–463.
Dröscher, Ariane. 2014. Microscopic Truths: The Multiple Realities of the Golgi Apparatus. In L’esperimento della storia. Saggi in onore di Renato G. Mazzolini, ed. Massimiliano Bucchi, Luca Ciancio, and Ariane Dröscher, 101–110. Trento: Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino.
Dulbecco, Renato. 1952. Production of Plaques in Monolayer Tissue Cultures by Single Particles of an Animal Virus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 38: 747–752.
Easton, John. 2009. Aron A. Moscona, PhD, 1921–2009. Targeted News Service. Washington D.C., 26 January.
Efron, Noah J. 2014. A Chosen Calling. Jews in Science in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
Feldman, Michael. 1955. Dissociation and Reaggregation of Embryonic Cells of Triturus alpestris. Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology 3 (3): 251–255.
Fell, Honor B. 1940. The Application of Tissue Culture in Vitro to Embryology. Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society. Transactions of the Society 7: 95–112.
Fell, Honor B. 1953. Recent Advances in Organ Culture. Science Progress (1933-) 41 (162): 212–231.
Fell, Honor B., and Robert Robinson. 1929. The Growth, Development and Phosphatase Activity of Embryonic Avian Femora and Limb-Buds Cultivated in Vitro. Biochemical Journal 23 (4): 767–784.
Fujimura, Joan. 1996. Standardizing Practices: A Socio-history of Experimental Systems in Classical Genetic and Virological Cancer Research, ca. 1920–1978. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 18: 3–54.
Gaillard, Peter J. 1957. Morphogenesis in Animal Tissue Cultures. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 19 (4): 591–607.
Galtsoff, Paul S. 1925. Regeneration after Dissociation (an Experimental Study on Sponges). Behavior of Dissociated Cells of Microciona prolifera under Normal and Altered Conditions. Journal of Experimental Zoology 42: 183–221.
Gersch, Isidore, and Hubert R. Catchpole. 1949. The Organization of Ground Substance and Basement Membrane and its Significance in Tissue Injury, Disease and Growth. American Journal of Anatomy 85: 457–521.
Grafe, Alfred. 1991. A History of Experimental Virology. Heidelberg: Springer.
Grunwald, Gerald B. 1991. The Conceptual and Experimental Foundation of Vertebrate Embryonic Cell Adhesion Research. In A Conceptual History of Modern Embryology, ed. Scott F. Gilbert, 129–158. New York: Plenum Press.
Grunwald, Gerald B. 2013. A Century of Cell Adhesion: From the Blastomere to the Clinic Part 1: Conceptual and Experimental Foundations and the Pre-molecular Era. Cell Communication & Adhesion 20 (6): 127–138.
Harrison, Ross G. 1910. The Outgrowth of the Nerve Fiber as a Mode of Protoplasmic Movement. Journal of Experimental Zoology 9 (4): 787–846.
Harrison, Ross G. 1911. On the Stereotropism of Embryonic Cells. Science 34 (870): 279–281.
Harwood, Jonathan. 1993. Styles of Scientific Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 1939. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Its History and Development, 1st ed. Jerusalem: Azriel Press.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 1942. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Its History and Development, 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Azriel Press.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 1948. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Its History and Development, 3rd ed. Jerusalem: Azriel Press.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 1957. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Its History and Development, 4th ed. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post Press.
Henderson, Brian. 2003. Out of One Eye: A Life Integrating Cellular Biochemistry and Function. Cell Biochemistry and Function 21: 201–206.
Herbst, Kurt. 1900. Über das Auseinandergehen von Furchungs- und Gewebezellen in Ca-freiem Medium. Archiv Für Entwicklungsmechanik Der Organismen 9: 424–463.
Holmes, Frederic L. 1974. Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry: The Emergence of a Scientist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Holmes, Frederic L. 2003. Laboratory Notebooks and Investigative Pathways. In Reworking the Bench. Research Notebooks in the History of Science, ed. Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, 295–307. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Holtfreter, Johannes. [1939] 1964. Tissue Affinity, a Means of Embryonic Morphogenesis. In Foundations of Experimental Embryology, eds. Benjamin H. Willier and Jane M. Oppenheimer, 186–225. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Holtfreter, Johannes. 1943. Properties and Function of the Surface Coat in Amphibian Embryos. Journal of Experimental Zoology 93: 251–323.
Holtfreter, Johannes. 1944. Experimental Studies on the Development of the Pronephros. Revue Canadienne De Biologie 3: 220–250.
Holtfreter, Johannes. 1948. Significance of the Cell Membrane in Embryonic Processes. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 49 (5): 709–760.
Horwitz, Alan R. 2012. The Origins of the Molecular Era of Adhesion Research. Nature Review Molecular Cell Biology 13 (12): 805–811.
Hubrecht Laboratory. 1957. General Embryological Information Service (GEIS). Utrecht: Hubrecht Laboratory.
Humphreys, Tom, Susie Humphreys, and Aron A. Moscona. 1960a. A Procedure for Obtaining Completely Dissociated Sponge Cells. The Biological Bulletin 119: 294.
Humphreys, Tom, Susie Humphreys, and Aron A. Moscona. 1960b. Rotation Mediated Aggregation of Dissociated Sponge Cells. The Biological Bulletin 119: 295.
Jensen, Aage B. 1953. Some Observation of the Action of Trypsin on Sea Urchin Eggs. Experimental Cell Research 4 (1): 60–68.
Jensen, Trevor. 2009. Aron A. Moscona 1921–2009: Pioneering Biologist; U. of C. Professor and Researcher Helped Unlock the Secrets of how Tissue and Organs Form, Saying Cells are “Like Parts of an Animated Jigsaw Puzzle.” Chicago Tribune, 28 January.
Khaner, Oded. 2017. Hefzibah Ayal-Giladi (1925–2017): Over Fifty Years of Embryological Research in Israel. International Journal of Developmental Biology 61: 121–126.
Kirsh, Nurit. 2004. Geneticist Elisabeth Goldschmidt: A Two-fold Pioneering Story. Israel Studies 9 (2): 71–105.
Kopac, Milan J. 1940. The Physical Properties of the Extraneous Coats of Living Cells. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia for Quantitative Biology 8: 154–170.
Korfiatis, Konstantinos J., and George P. Stamou. 1994. Emergence of New Fields in Ecology. The Case of Life History Studies. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 16 (1): 97–116.
Landecker, Hannah. 2002. New Times for Biology: Cell Culture and the Advent of Cellular Life in Vitro. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33: 667–694.
Landecker, Hannah. 2005. Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Film Theory. Critical Enquiry 31: 903–937.
Landecker, Hannah. 2007. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Landecker, Hannah. 2009. Seeing Things: From Microcinematography to Live Cell Imaging. Nature Methods 6 (10): 707–709.
Leland, Diane S., and Christine C. Ginocchio. 2007. Role of Cell Culture for Virus Detection in the Age of Technology. Clinical Microbiology Reviews 20 (1): 49–78.
Loebenstein, Gad, and Eli Putievsky. 2007. Agricultural Research in Israel. In Agricultural Research Management, ed. Gad Loebenstein and George Thottappilly, 357–365. Dordrecht: Springer.
Logan, Cheryl A. 2017. The Physiology of Erotization: Comparative Neuroendocrinology in Eugen Steinach’s Physiology Department. In Vivarium. Experimental, Quantitative and Theoretical Biology at Vienna’s Biologische Versuchsanstalt, Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology, ed. Gerd B. Müller, 209–230. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lombard, Jonathan. 2014. Once Upon a Time the Cell Membranes: 175 Years of Cell Boundary Research. Biology Direct 9: 32.
MacLeod, Miles, and Nancy J. Nersessian. 2016. Interdisciplinary Problem Solving: Emerging Models in Integrative Systems Biology. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 6: 401–418.
Maienschein, Jane. 1978. Ross Harrison's Crucial Experiment as a Foundation for Modern American Experimental Embryology. PhD diss., Indiana University.
Maienschein, Jane. 1991. Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880–1915. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
Mahowald, Anthony P. 2014. Aron Moscona 1929-2009. In Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences.
McNeil, Donald G., Jr. 2009. Aron Moscona, 87, Biologist who Explored Embryonic Cells. New York Times, 26 January.
Moscona, Aron A. 1948. Utilization of Mineral Constituents of the Egg-shell by the Developing Embryo of the Stick Insect. Nature 162 (4106): 62–63.
Moscona, Aron A. 1950a. Studies of the Egg of Bacillus libanicus (Orthoptera, Phasmidae): I The Egg Envelopes. Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 91 (2): 183–193.
Moscona, Aron A. 1950b. Studies of the Egg of Bacillus libanicus (Orthoptera, Phasmidae): II Moisture, Dry Material, and Minerals in the Developing Egg. Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 91 (2): 195–203.
Moscona, Aron A. 1950c. Blastokinesis and Embryonic Development in a Phasmid. Experientia Basel 6 (11): 425–428.
Moscona, Aron A. 1950d. Studies of the Anatomy and Histology of the Pancreas in Snakes and Lizards. PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Moscona, Aron A. 1952. Cell Suspensions from Organ Rudiments of the Early Chick Embryo. Experimental Cell Research 3: 535–539.
Moscona, Aron A. 1954a. Bacterial Cellulose Membranes as a Mechanical Substrate in Tissue Culture of Organs. Excerpta Medica 8 (9): 421.
Moscona, Aron A. 1954b. Seasonal Changes in the Islets of Langerhans in Snakes. Bulletin of the Israel Research Council 4: 253–255.
Moscona, Aron A. 1955a. Physiology Coursebook. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Moscona, Aron A. 1955b. Cytoplasmic Granules in Myogenic Cells. Experimental Cell Research 9: 377–380.
Moscona, Aron A. 1958. Differentiation of Myoblasts. In Cytodifferentiation, ed. Dorothea Rudnick, 49–51. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Moscona, Aron A. 1962a. Cellular Interactions in Experimental Histogenesis. In International Review of Experimental Pathology, eds. Goetz W. Richter, and Michael A. Epstein, vol. 1, 371–428. New York: Academic Press.
Moscona, Aron A. 1962b. Analysis of Cell Recombination in Experimental Synthesis of Tissues in Vitro. Journal of Cellular and Comparative Physiology 60 (1): 65–80.
Moscona, Aron A. 1986. Johannes Holtfreter at Eighty Five. Cell Differentiation 19: 75–77.
Moscona, Aron A., and Haya Moscona. 1952a. The Dissociation and Aggregation of Cells from Organ Rudiments of the Early Chick Embryo. Journal of Anatomy 86 (3): 287–301.
Moscona, Aron A., and Haya Moscona. 1953. Development in Vitro of Embryonic Organ Rudiments on Heterologous Adult Tissue Derivatives. Bulletin of the Research Council of Israel 3: 197–200.
Moscona, Haya, and Aron A. Moscona. 1952b. The Development in Vitro of the Anterior Lobe of the Embryonic Chick Pituitary. Journal of Anatomy 86 (3): 278–286.
Moscona, Malka, and Aron A. Moscona. 1963. Inhibition of Adhesiveness and Aggregation of Dissociated Cells by Inhibitors of Protein and RNA Synthesis. Science 142: 1070–1071.
Okada, Tokindo S. 1996. The Path Leading to the Discovery of Cadherins. In Retrospect. Development, Growth & Differentiation 38: 583–596.
Oppenheimer, Jane M. 1978. Taking Things Apart and Putting Them Together Again. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (2): 149–161.
Price, Dorothy. 1974. Carl Richard Moore. 1892–1955. In Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2010. An Epistemology of the Concrete. Twentieth Century Histories of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Richmond, Marsha L. 2012. A Model Collaborative Couple in Genetics: Anna Rachel Whiting and Phineas Westcott Whiting’s Study of Sex Determination in Habrobracon. In For Better or for Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences, ed. Annette Lykknes, Donald L. Opitz, and Brigitte van Tiggelen, 149–189. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Rinaldini, Luis M.J. 1954a. A Quantitative Method of Cell Culture. The Journal of Physiology. Supplementary Issue 123 (2): 20–21.
Rinaldini, Luis M.J. 1954b. A Quantitative Method for Growing Animal Cells in Vitro. Nature 173 (4415): 1134–1135.
Rinaldini, Luis M.J. 1958. The Isolation of Living Cells from Animal Tissues. International Review of Cytology 7: 587–647.
Sander, Klaus. 1997. Landmarks in Developmental Biology 1883–1924. Berlin: Springer.
Schönheimer, Rudolph. 1942. The Dynamic State of Body Constituents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schürch, Caterina. 2017. How Mechanisms Explain Interfield Cooperation: Biological-Chemical Study of Plant Growth Hormones in Utrecht and Pasadena, 1930–1938. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39: 16.
Schwerdtfeger, Fritz. 1973. Forest Entomology. In History of Entomology, ed. Ray F. Smith, Thomas E. Mittler, and Carroll N. Smith, 361–386. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Review Inc.
Sela-Donenfeld, Dalit, and Franck Dale. 2017. Preface. International Journal of Developmental Biology 61: 115–120.
Shelomi, Matan. 2011. Phasmid Eggs Do Not Survive Digestion by Quails and Chickens. Journal of Ortopthera Research 20: 159–162.
Sobel, Haya, and Aron A. Moscona. 1954. Cultivation of Embryonic Organ Rudiments on a Medium Derived Entirely from Adult Tissues. Experientia 10: 502–506.
Squier, Susan M. 2000. Life and Death at Strangeways: The Tissue Culture Point of View. In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics, ed. Paul E. Brodwin, 27–52. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Steinberg, Malcom S., and Scott F. Gilbert. 2004. Townes and Holtfreter (1955): Directed Movements and Selective Adhesion of Embryonic Amphibian Cells. Journal of Experimental Zoology 301A (9): 701–706.
Stramer, Brian M., and Graham A. Dunn. 2015. Cells on Film. The Past and Future of Cinemicroscopy. Journal of Cell Science 128: 9–13.
Svensson, Anna, Elin Nicklasson, Timothy P. Harrah, Bruce Panilaitis, David L. Kaplan, Mats Brittberg, and Paul Gatenholm. 2005. Bacterial Cellulose as a Potential Scaffold for Tissue Engineering of Cartilage. Biomaterials 26: 419–431.
Theodor, Oskar, and Aron A. Moscona. 1954. On Bat Parasites in Palestine I Nycteribiidae, Streblidae, Hemiptera, Siphonaptera. Parasitology 44 (1–2): 157–245.
Thomson, David. 1914a. Some Further Researches on the Cultivation of Tissues in Vitro. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 7: 21–46.
Thomson, David. 1914b. Controlled Growth (en masse) of Embryonic Chick Tissue in Vitro. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 7: 71–75.
Townes, Philip L. 1953. Effect of Proteolytic Enzymes on the Fertilization Membrane and Jelly Layers of the Amphibian Embryo. Experimental Cell Research 4 (1): 96–101.
Vecchi, Davide, and Isaac Hernàndez. 2014. The Epistemological Resilience of the Concept of Morphogenetic Field. In Towards a Theory of Development, ed. Alessandro Minelli and Thomas Pradeu, 79–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Volcani, Elazari I. 1919. Baderech. Giaffa: Hapoal Hazair.
Watts, Geoff. 2009. Aron Arthur Moscona. The Lancet 373 (9664): 626.
Weiss, Paul. 1945. Experiments on Cell and Axon Orientation in Vitro: The Role of Colloidal Exudates in Tissue Organization. Journal of Experimental Zoology 100 (3): 353–386.
Weiss, Paul, and Aron A. Moscona. 1958. Type-specific Morphogenesis of Cartilages Developed from Dissociated Limb and Scleral Mesenchyme in Vitro. Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology 6 (2): 238–246.
Willmer, Edward N. 1989. One Man’s View of Cell Biology in Cambridge in the 1930s. Trends in Biochemical Sciences 14 (5): 193–195.
Wilson, Duncan. 2005. The Early History of Tissue Culture in Britain: The Interwar Years. Society for the History of Medicine 18 (2): 225–243.
Wilson, Duncan. 2011. Tissue Culture in Science and Society. The Public Life of a Biological Technique in Twentieth Century Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wilson, Henry Van Peters. 1907. On Some Phenomena of Coalescence and Regeneration in Sponges. Journal of Experimental Zoology 5 (2): 245–258.
Wolf, Itzhak L. 1977. The Levant Vole Microtus guentheri (Danford et Alston, 1882). Economic Importance and Control. EPPO Bulletin 7 (2): 277–281.
Wylie, John A. H. 1967. The History and the Development of Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture. In The Cancer Cell in Vitro, eds. Edmund Jack Ambrose, Dorothy M. Easty, and John A. H. Wylie, 1–12. London: Butterworths.
Acknowledgements
I sincerely thank Ute Deichmann, the director of the Jacques Loeb Centre for History and Philosophy of, and Critical Dialogues in, the Life Sciences for being a supportive, critical and trusting post-doc supervisor; Silvia Caianiello for the many insightful comments on this typescript; my colleagues Ari Barell and Noa Sophie Kohler who were precious interlocutors during the two years I spent at the Jacques Loeb Centre and during the whole gestation of this article. I wish to thank my Hebrew teachers Ora Denis and Irit Matmor for being the source of my interest for the Israeli context and an inexhaustible source of motivation whenever language difficulties came up. I am indebted to Ofer Tzemach, the director of the Hebrew University Archive, Elisabetta Tamburrini, the director of the Philosophy Library of Sapienza University of Rome and her collaborator Paola Zenobi for their professional help in accessing archive and published sources. I also sincerely thank my two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Journal of the History of Biology for their constructive remarks on the typescript, which were crucial for its improvement. Finally, my most grateful thanks are to Prof. Anne Moscona for sharing with me her memories, family documents, and scientific expertise.
Funding
This research was funded by a post-doctoral grant from the Jacques Loeb Centre for History and Philosophy of, and Critical Dialogues in, the Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer sheva (Israel).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Not applicable.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Passariello, A. From Entomological Research to Culturing Tissues: Aron Moscona’s Investigative Pathway. J Hist Biol 54, 555–601 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09663-4
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09663-4