Commentary on Le Douarin, 1973 and 1974

Developmental Biology has a long, rich history of publishing papers that have influenced the field for decades. As 2019 marks the 80th anniversary of the Society for Developmental Biology, I thought it would be useful to republish a sampling of these classic papers both to highlight their impact and also to give a sense of how the field has advanced. To begin this series, I have chosen two papers by Nicole Le Douarin and colleagues that are personally important to me and helped to shape my thinking as a young scientist. The first is a technical note that introduces the quail-chick chimera grafting technique; the second one, published one year later, utilizes the technique to test the developmental potential of neural crest cells by grafting them to other axial levels. Published in Developmental Biology in 1973 and 1974, respectively, these papers were paradigm shifting in the neural crest field and established Le Douarin as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.