Making Visible Embryos (review)

Making Visible Embryos is a virtual exhibition of the history of human embryology whose production was funded by the Wellcome Trust. The Web site centers around 10 single-screen pages: an “Introduction,” eight topic pages, each of which has several subpages, and “Resources.” The topic pages and subpages give a brief and sometime casual view of the area and range from the odd to the fascinating. This material seems to be designed for the casual browser, who may well be confused by the terseness of the text, or perhaps for the interested undergraduate historian of science; the “Resources” page of over 200 references and Web sites is only likely to be appreciated by honors students, graduate students, and professionals, once they get the hang of the slightly odd hyperlinking.

It is not initially obvious from their titles how the eight topic pages and their subpages flow, but a glance at the “User’s Guide” (top-right corner) makes it clear that a topic page summarizes a time-slice of history (a slice not given on its Web page) that may, for unclear reasons, overlap with the time-slice of other pages. This user at least found it confusing, for example, to find that “Unborn” means the period 1300–1800s, and “Development” covers 1770–1800, while far too much has happened in the last 50 years for it to be summarized by a single page called “Intervention,” particularly when the only interventions considered are abortion and assisted conception—there is nothing on fetal surgery and only the barest mention of genes and stem cells. All in all, I think that neither the nomenclature nor the organization of the topic really works.

The 120 or so pictures from 1400 onwards provide an interesting and important summary of how artists and anatomists have tried to make sense of human development over the last few hundred years; users should realize that clicking on the pictures not only gives an enlarged image but provides some useful description and a reference. My two gripes here are that the pictures can only be copied via screenshots (rather than downloaded as JPEGs) and that the “Unborn” page shows mediocre Dutch and Italian pictures of embryos in utero from 1554 and 1642, but explicitly fails to give da Vinci’s wonderful 1511 drawing, the first real image of a human embryo (freely downloadable via Google), preferring a far inferior Jacob Rueff woodcut that was also made in 1511. What would it have cost to have given both?

My feeling about this virtual exhibition is that it is more virtuous than enjoyable, and this is particularly so in the display of contemporary material. One of the values of Web technology is that it is easy to include movies, and I was looking forward to seeing ultrasound movies, perhaps comparing fetuses with normal and abnormal hearts, but there are just two old ultrasound pictures, one from 1958 (it was the first ever taken, so it earns its place), and the other from 1963 —no movies and nothing on CAT and NMR scans. The absence of contemporary visuals is disappointing, as is the brief discussion of mouse models: there are many transgenic mice that not only show how gene action affects developmental anatomy but are wonderfully colorful; it seems a shame just to show a dull X-ray of a transgenic mouse whose phenotype is a few tumors, particularly as much current work on human development uses transgenic mouse models to investigate the origins of congenital abnormalities. Here, a link with the section on “Monsters” could have been made to connect the old with the new, but it wasn’t—probably because the site’s time-based structure doesn’t encourage links across pages.

A lot of work has gone into producing this Web exhibition with its punning title, but the authors have not really appreciated what Web technology would have let them do if only they had taken a less book-bound view of their material. The net result is that the Web site is visually...