Onward -- Altenberg 16 At Howard University

Move over Charles Darwin, this year's the 125th anniversary of Ernest Everett Just's birth. And that's what brings Altenberg 16's dynamic duo -- New York Medical College cell biologist Stuart Newman and Konrad Lorenz Institute chair Gerd Müller -- to Howard University this week.

Newman has co-organized a symposium to honor EE Just
(1883-1941), the embryologist who trailblazed today's Evo-Devo (evolutionary developmental biology) as well as Eco-Devo (ecological developmental biology).

Just is known for his fertilization experiments, particularly his observation that a wave of negativity occurs at the time a sperm penetrates an egg, blocking the entrance to any other sperm.

EE Just taught at Howard University in Washington, DC for much of his career where he headed the zoology department. He spent summers conducting research on marine invertebrates at Woods Hole in Massachusetts.

Home-schooled by his mother until age 13, Just qualified academically to study at a private high school in New Hampshire where he became editor of the newspaper. Perhaps even more important for a budding scientist -- Just was also president of the debate team. He graduated magna cum laude from Darmouth and received his PhD from the University of Chicago.

His first marriage was to Ethel Highwarden, who also taught at Howard. They had three children.

In search of better opportunity during the Depression years, Just resettled in Europe where he continued his work at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, at the Sorbonne and in Naples while maintaining his affiliation with Howard. He remarried -- Hedwig Schnetzler, his research assistant, with whom he wrote the book The Biology of the Cell Surface.

Howard University biologist W. Malcolm Byrnes, co-organizer of this week's Just symposium, notes Just was first to associate cell surface and the structured layer below it as "key players in development, heredity and even evolution."

Gerd Müller, who presided over the historic kickoff of the reformulation of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution or "Extended Synthesis" at KLI in Altenberg, Austria last July, says "Just's emphasis on external conditions and the determinative role of the natural setting" was seen as "somewhat unorthodox" during his lifetime when the focus was on internal mechanisms. Müller will discuss the roots of Eco-Devo and Theoretical Biology in Vienna in the early 1900s.

Other participants in the EE Just symposium (partial list) include MIT science historian and Just biographer Kenneth Manning -- who will address the relevance of Just's work in the "Age of Obama", Wesleyan University's Sonia Sultan on Eco-Devo and Paul Wassarman from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, mammalian fertilization.

Stuart Newman will "explore Just's theme" of a less central role of genes in development in relation to his own theory of form based on dynamical patterning modules (DPMs) -- which now serves as the centerpiece of the Extended Synthesis.

The event is funded by the National Science Foundation. Admission is free and the symposium open to all (possibly standing-room-only at the time of this writing).

Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur's reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

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