Growing up in Brazil, Marcos Simões-Costa often visited his grandparents’ farm in the Amazon. That immersion in nature — squawking toucans and all — sparked his fascination with science and evolution. But a video of a developing embryo, shown in his middle school science class, cemented his desire to become a developmental biologist.
“It’s such a beautiful process,” he says. “I was always into drawing and art, and it was very visual — the shapes of the embryo changing, the fact that you start with one cell and the complexity is increasing. I just got lost in that video.”
Today, Simões-Costa, of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, is honoring his younger self by demystifying how the embryo develops. He studies the embryos and stem cells of birds and mice to learn how networks of genes and the elements that control them influence the identity of cells. The work could lead to new treatments for various diseases, including cancer.
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