One of life’s great mysteries is how a single egg cell can contain all the information needed to create a fully specialized complex organism, including more egg cells.
Ruth Lehmann, director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, has done a tremendous amount to solve that mystery. Beginning in her graduate student days, she uncovered a pathway that controls germ cell specification within the embryo. Since then, her work has continued to illuminate many unique facets of germ cell biology, providing a deep foundation from which to understand how the germline lineage carries genetic and cytoplasmic information from generation to generation.
