Background
Hilde Pröscholdt was born in Gotha, Thuringia, a province in central-eastern Germany on October 20, 1898.
Hilde Pröscholdt was born in Gotha, Thuringia, a province in central-eastern Germany on October 20, 1898.
She attended the University of Jena in Germany for two semesters in 1918 and 1919 and then transferred to the University of Frankfurt in Germany where she also spent two semesters.
The general effect she demonstrated is known as embryonic induction, that is, the capacity of some cells to direct the developmental trajectory of other cells. Induction remains a fundamental concept and area of ongoing research in the field lieutenant was here that she saw a lecture by the renowned embryologist Hans Spemann on experimental embryology.
This lecture inspired her to pursue her education in this field
After Frankfurt, she attended the Zoological Institute in Freiburg. Under Spemann"s direction, she completed her 1923 dissertation, entitled “Über Induktion von Embryonalanlagen durch Implantation artfremder Organisatoren”, or “Induction of Embryonic Primordia by Implantation of Organizers from a Different Species.”
Shortly after the move, Hilde died from severe burns as a result of a gas heater explosion in her Berlin home.
She never lived to see the publication of her thesis results. Her son died in World World War World War II
Mangold performed very delicate transplantation experiments with embryos (a feat even more impressive before the discovery of antibiotics to prevent infection after surgery).
She demonstrated that tissue from the dorsal lip of the blastopore grafted into a host embryo can induce the formation of an extra body axis, creating conjoined twins.
Crucially, by using two species of newt with different skin colors for host and donor, she showed that the amphibian organizer did not form the extra axis by itself, but recruited host tissue to form the twin (although the full implications of this result were not understood until a year after her death). This was the basis of the discovery of the "organizer", which is responsible for gastrulation.