Hilde Mangold
Hilde Mangold was a German embryologist who was best known for her 1923 dissertation which was the foundation for her mentor, Hans Spemann's, 1935 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the embryonic organizer, "one of the very few doctoral theses in biology that have directly resulted in the awarding of a Nobel Prize". 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.
Early years
Hilde Mangold was born 20 October 1898 in Gotha Thuringia, an east central German province. Her parents, Ernest and Gertrude Proescholdt, owned a soap factory, and were considered quite wealthy for the time. Little else is known about Hilde’s early life. She attended the University of Jena for two years before transferring to the University of Frankfurt in 1919.
It was at the University of Frankfurt that she heard a lecture by Hans Spemann, and was inspired to pursue embryology research in graduate school. In fact, Hilde Mangold began her doctoral work in 1920 at the University of Friedburg in Germany, and soon joined Spemann’s laboratory for her doctoral work.
Nobel prize
She won none.
But Hans Spemann won The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1935 alone although Hilde Mangold made a great contribution that lead to the prestigious award. He only mentioned her twice during his lecture.
Key experiments
Mangold performed very delicate transplantation experiments with embryos. 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. This was the basis of the discovery of the "organizer", which is responsible for gastrulation.
Death
She died from sever injuries caused in a domestic accident while she was making her son's meal. She never saw her work published and her son died later during World War II.
