The Cortex Of The Brain In The Human Embryo During The Fourth Month With Special Reference To The So-Called Papille Of Retzius (1907)
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George Linius Streeter was an American embryologist. He was Director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, during his adminixtration many advanced investigators were made at the laboratory.
Background
George was born on January 12, 1873 in Johnstown, New York, United States. He was the only son and third of four children born to George Austin Streeter and Hannah Green (Anthony) Streeter.
His father was a leader in the local glove-manufacturing industry. Both parents were of English descent, having migrated to Johnstown via New England.
His mother was a Quaker, his father a Presbyterian, and the children were brought up in the Presbyterian belief.
Education
After preparation in the local public schools, George entered Union College, from which he was graduated in 1895. He then studied medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, where he took his A. M. and M. D. degrees in 1899.
To prepare himself for practice in the diseases of the nervous system he studied in Germany (1902 - 1903) with the anatomist Ludwig Edinger at Frankfurt and the embryologist Wilhelm His at Leipzig.
Career
Following an internship (1899 - 1900) at Roosevelt Hospital, New York, he became assistant to Dr. Henry Hun, a prominent neurologist of Albany, New York, and also taught the anatomy of the nervous system at Albany Medical College (1901 - 1902).
Strongly attracted by embroyological research, on his return to the United States, Streeter gave up the practice of medicine and in 1904 joined the department of anatomy of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore, under Franklin P. Mall. Streeter's first publications, in German and American anatomical journals, dealt with the structure and development of the nervous system. They revealed a peculiar fitness for morphological research by reason of his strong powers of visual observation, accurate draftsmanship, keen analysis, and clear descriptive writing.
After a brief excursion into experimental embryology of the amphibian auditory organs, Streeter returned for the rest of his career to descriptive embryology. In 1906-1907 he was assistant professor of anatomy at the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia.
From 1907 to 1914 he was professor of human anatomy at the University of Michigan, where he continued work on the development of the human brain, nerves, and auditory system. His chapter on the development of the major structures of the brain, in the Handbook of Human Embryology edited by Franz Keibel and Franklin P. Mall (1910), remains the most authoritative account of this complicated subject.
In 1914, Mall, who had just launched the department of embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, located at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, called Streeter back to Baltimore as a research associate. Three years later, after Mall's untimely death, Streeter succeeded to the directorship. Under his guidance the Laboratory, already possessing one of the world's largest collections of human embryological material, was developed, and Mall's program was further expanded.
Gathering a staff of outstanding investigators and highly skilled technical aides Streeter led and encouraged morphological and experimental work that made his department the leading center of embryological research. During his directorship its publications filled twenty-two volumes (VIII-XXIX) of the Contributions to Embryology of the Carnegie Institution, one of the most distinguished American scientific publications in both text and illustrations.
All Streeter's major investigations were so perfectly executed that the results superseded previous work on the same topics and defy further refinement by methods known at present.
Streeter participated, from 1925 to 1941, with Heuser and Carl G. Hartman in a masterly study (in Contributions to Embryology, vol. XXIX, 1941) of the early embryology of the rhesus monkey.
His encouragement of Arthur T. Hertig of Harvard University and John Rock of the Free Hospital for Women, Brookline, Massachussets, resulted in an extraordinary advance in human embryology. The earliest stages of human development, previously practically unknown before the third week after conception, were revealed from the first day onward, by specimens collected by Hertig and Rock and prepared by Heuser and the Carnegie laboratory's technical staff. Streeter contributed also to the pathology of the embryo and fetus, notably by a revolutionary explanation of defects in which the loss of a limb (intrauterine amputation) or similar damage is associated with adhesions of the amnion at the site of injury. He showed that the constrictive adhesions do not cause the defect but rather result from it through the adhesion of the amnion to necrotic tissue.
After his retirement in 1940, Streeter devoted himself to the compilation of a series of papers entitled "Developmental Horizons in Human Development", a descriptive and pictorial classification of the stages of embryonic development relating the successive changes of external form to those of the internal structures. These "Horizons" provide a standard with which any embryo may be compared in order to ascertain its age or detect evidences of retardation or defective development. All Streeter's work is marked by great clarity and independent interpretation.
His training as a physician and his early experience in the experimental study of living amphibian embryos taught him to regard the human embryo not as a mere blueprint for the adult, but rather as a living organism itself, with organs and tissues that are actively functioning even while they undergo change and development. He thus avoided the errors of those who, misapplying the "law of recapitulation, " thought of the embryo as modeling the adult stages of successive ancestral forms.
He was a prolific writer in his field, with from two to five articles published almost every year from 1903 until his death in 1948, plus two published posthumously; in the same years, he published five books.
Streeter died suddenly in 1948 from a coronary occlusion in a hospital at Gloversville, New York.
He was a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1943. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1928). He was also a member of the American Association of Anatomists (1927).
Personality
Although he was an outwardly conventional person, reserved with strangers and little known outside his own field, Streeter's characteristically indirect, whimsical, and often surprisingly iconoclastic pronouncements on embryological theory never failed to stimulate his associates.
Connections
On April 9, 1910, Streeter married Julia Allen Smith of Ann Arbor, Michigan. They had three children: Sarah Frances, George Allen, and Mary Raymond. The elder daughter took her Ph. D. in chemistry; both the son and the younger daughter became physicians.