Ontogenesis of Man: From Conception to Adulthood and to His Final Destination

CHAPTER 1

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

S ince man began to speculate about his nature and surroundings, the human body and its shape has held a particular fascination for him, as a vehicle of expression and instrument of the senses. As long age, as 4000 years B.C., during the old kingdom in Egypt, and ancient Greece, anatomical canons were in use. In their striving for perfection, ancient sculptures studied many human physiques and body proportions, fig1, A, B, &C.

Fig 1 A, Studies in body proportions, Ancient Egypt 5000 BC.

Curiously enough the art of measurements of the human body began as an artistic, not a scientific one, and was taught under the name of Symmetria in Greece, at the time of Hippocrates, the 1st physician in ancient Greece 460-370 BC.

Fig 1 B, Studies in body proportions

by Leonardo da vinci, 15th century.

After European dark ages, Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), the great Italian renaissance sculptor and scientist, revived the interest in human body and its proportions. Michel Anglo (1475-1564), a sculptor, architect and poet who is considered as one of the greatest artistic geniuses who ever lived, early in his life he studied different body proportions and anatomy, using the dead bodies which was strictly forbidden by the church during that time, in return for that, he used to donate some painting to the church. This enabled him to create his great pieces of arts that expressed the full beauty of the human physique e.g the last judgment; the ceiling paintings of Romes Sistine Chapel; and to give life to his master piece of sculpture David, fig 1C. He said;

"the human body is but a shadow of the divine perfection".

Fig 1 C, David, the master piece of Michel Anglo, who said

"the human body is a shadow of divine perfection".

The 1st treatise on development of man was written by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, (384-322 B.C.), He was the 1st to formulate that an embryo must be either preformed in the male semen, and only merely enlarging during its development inside the uterus of the mother, or it may be actually differentiating from a formless beginning from the menstrual blood based on the fact that menstrual blood does not occur after pregnancy. Until about the year 1800, it was generally believed either that a fully formed animal exists in miniature in the egg, needing only the stimulus from the sperm to initiate its growth and development; or that a similarly preformed miniature baby, a boy or a girl, constitute the sperm, and these merely enlarge when they get inside the egg, and enlarge more when they get inside the uterus of the mother till birth. Fig 2.

Fig.2, Human sperm cell, containing a miniature baby,

according to Hartsoeker (1694)

With the advances associated with the invention of the microscope, this original pre-formation theory was virtually destroyed by wolf (1759-1769), who suggested that every living organism comes from preexisting living organism "omne vivum ex vive"; and every cell arises from the subdivision of a pre-existing cell "omnis cellula e cellula)" and that was a fundamental concept.

Ponder (1917), demonstrated the 3 germ layers of the embryo from which different parts of the body develop (the ectoderm, the mesoderm, and the endoderm). Von Boer (1927), first reported on the sperm of man and other mammals, and identified the mammalian egg. Cleavage or multiple divisions of the egg after fertilization to develop the body of the embryo was 1st described by Prevast and Dumas (1824), but its true meaning has to wait for the recognition of the cell as the structural and functional unit of the organism.

By 1866, the Austrian monk, Gregory Mendel, known as the father of modern genetics, discovered the basic principles of heredity through experiments on plants in his garden. He published the result of his work on heredity, this come to be known as Mendelism. He reported that a simple character is regulated by 2 particles (now they are called genes), and each parent contributes one of these two particles.

During that time, this was not clearly understood till 1912, when Thomas Morgan, an American evolutionary biologist and geneticist, famous of his experimental research with the fruit fly Drosophila, and his associates at Calteck’s Research Institute of Technology in California, amassed convincing evidence that the chromosomes present in the nucleus of the fertilized egg, have localized genes which have a definite determinative powers in controlling all aspects of growth of the human body, not only on the growing foetus in the uterus, but also during the whole life span, this paved the road to studies in human genome.

Karl Friedrick Gauss, 1807 at the university of Gottingen, devised the Gaussian Curve (The bell shaped normal distribution curve) for a series of observations in which the center of the scatter is the mean value, and the scatter is summarized by standard deviations around the mean value of the curve, so he put the foundation of the probability theory and the accurate statistical analysis of data on scientific bases. To honor him, Germany issued a ten deutschmark banknote which bore the portrait of Gauss and a picture of his bell shaped Gaussian curve, this banknote is out of circulation nowadays after Germany switched to Euro.

Fig 3, The last ten deutschmark bill, representing Gauss and,

to his right, the bell shaped Gaussian curve.

Adolph Quetlet (1796-1874), collected statistical data and started constructing standards from the mean values for chest size, height, and birth weight for babies. Through his construct of "l’ home moyen physique, and l’homme moyen morale;" which means the physically and morally average man, he also created a normal range of deviations from the mean value of the bell-shaped Gaussion curve that positions all people either to the right or left of the mean, and the variability or deviation around the mean value (the odds), become exponentially more rare as the magnitude of the deviation from the mean increased.

The increase in the decrease:

The main point of the Gaussian Curve is that most observations hover around the mediocre of the scatter (The average value); and the odds of a deviation decline faster and faster as we move away from the average. This dramatic increase in the speed of decline in the odds as we move away from the middle of the distribution, can be illustrated, for example, if we assume that the average height for adult men and women in the population is 167 cm, and the unit of deviation around the average is 10 cm, in this case, the odds are as follows:

1-   Taller than 177 cm (1 SD above the mean): is 1 in 7

2-   Taller than 187 cm (2 SD above the mean); is 1 in 44.

3-   Taller than 197 cm (3 SD above the mean); is 1 in 800.

4-   Taller than 207 cm (4 SD above the mean); is 1 in 32,000.

5-   Taller than 217 cm (5 SD above the mean); is 1 in 5,000,000.

6-   Taller than 227 cm (6 SD above the mean); is 1 in 1000,000,000

7-   Taller than 237cm (7 SD above the mean): is 1 in 800,000,000,000, and so on.

Such a person hardly exist in reality, simply because the population of the world is only 6 billions. This increase in the decrease of odds as we move away from the average value for any parameter (in our case any anthropometric measurements), is what allows us to ignore all the extreme odds (outliers) which lie outside the bell-shaped Gaussian Curve. The point of this list is to illustrate the acceleration in the decline, look at the difference in odds between 60 and 70 cm taller than average, i.e from 227 cm to 237 cm we go from one in a billion people, to one in 800 billions.

Most Biological and medical parameters of quantitative results follow that bell shaped Gaussian curve (normal distribution) where the mean value is in the middle of the curve, and mean ± 1 SD include 68% of the observations; and mean ± 2 SD. Include 95%; and mean ± 3 SD (the total area under the curve) include all normal observations. Outside ± 3 SD from the mean value is considered outliers and abnormal and this is the basis of the statistical theory. This is demonstrated in Fig 4, showing the distribution of adult male height in the population, note the bell-shaped distribution of the data, also the frequency around the mean value, which is 170 cm, becoming rarer and rarer as we move away from the mean in either side.

Fig 4, Distribution of adult male height around the mean value 170 cm.

For height, the tallest man living and recorded by Guinness is Sultan Kosen in Turkey, who measured 251 cm. Max Palmer from U.S.A (229 cm), and Jorge Gonzalez of Argentina (231 cm), both were professional wrestlers. Their great size and their continued growth in adulthood is due to hypertrophy of the pituitary gland which results in an abnormally high levels of growth hormone

Since that time, research in human growth is literally voluminous, Bowdish (1872-1891), at Harvard University, studied 24,000 Boston children aged 5-15 years, it was the 1st longitudinal study in U.S.A based on measurements on the same children over a long span of years. He reported on the seasonal variation in growth, adverse effects of poor socio-economic conditions and disease on the rates of growth. He exchanged data across the Atlantic with workers in Europe, they came to the same conclusions, each discovered the adolescent growth spurt, and its occurrence 2 years earlier in girls than in boys.

Scammon, the great American Anatomist (1927-1935), in his anatomical records, gave his results about problems investigated, principles established, and questions awaiting further investigations. Nancy Bayley (1899-1994), a psychiatrist, started the Berkeley growth study at the University of California.

Franz Boas (1892), one of the great American pioneers of human growth, published earliest reports on maturation of children, he described the tendency for growth to be rapid (early maturation), or slow (late maturation), and named it Tempo of Growth.

Frank Shuttelworth (1937), started the longitudinal growth study at Harvard on 3600 children aged 5-12 years in Boston, he took the age at peak height velocity as a measure of the tempo of growth.

D’Arcy Thomson, to whose classical work all students of relative growth owe so much wrote: "The study of growth may be descriptive merely, or it may become analytical, we begin by describing the shape of an object in the simple words of common speech, and end by defining it in the precise language of mathematics, and the one method tends to follow the other in strict scientific order and historical continuity", quoted by J. Huxley (in problems of relative growth 1932).

Alex Roche (1980), at the Fels Research Institute, yellow springs, Ohio, started the Fels longitudinal study on four generations from birth up to adolescence; and the relation between body composition and selected cardio-vascular, and metabolic diseases.

Frank Falkner (1986), at the University of California, Berkeley is an internationally recognized leader in pediatric growth and development, he was an early advocate of research into foetal growth and its impact on health after birth.

Andrea Prader, 1970, at Zurich, was interested in endocrinology of growth and its disorders. He was responsible for introducing growth principles to pediatricians; and become the pioneer of treatment with growth hormone for children with short stature in Europe. This application again strengthen the bonds between growth and medicine, and made the subject more respectable. He was the founder of the 1st pediatric endocrinology association in the world.

The great advances in endocrinology during the last few decades, and our ability to measure small amounts of hormones in the child’s blood by chemical means; led to more understanding to the mechanisms that controls growth of children especially at puberty, and to the reasons behind abnormal growth.

Although, the human body has been studied for millennia, but it is only recently that scientists have understood how much information can be derived from the analysis of growth data. The study of such change, is largely the creation of the immortal James Tanner (1920-2010), first professor of growth and development, Institute of Child Health at London University, who wrote;

"childs’ growth rate reflects, better than any other single index, not only his state of health and nutrition, but also the condition of the society in which he lives, it is a mirror reflecting the socio-economic condition of the community".

Over 50 distinguished years, James Tanner, was involved in investigating growth and development of children, just after the 2nd world war, he started the Harpenden Growth Study. This was the 1st longitudinal study in U.K., from 1948 to 1971, every six months children were measured, photographed under standardized conditions, hand wrist X-rays were taken to estimate bone age, and their sexual maturation was also recorded. Data gathered led to the construction of modern growth charts, used by pediatricians around the world. He demonstrated that early, normal, and late puberty were all parts of the normal spectrum of growth in healthy children.

The Harpenden data gave rise to what come to be known as the Tanner Maturity scale, which measures the sexual maturation at adolescence, based on characteristics that can be objectively measured, they are a pictorial representation of changes in genitalia, public hair, and breasts which is widely used all over the world; he put a scoring system for skeletal maturation and bone age (TWI method); and provided mathematical equations to predict final adult height for children from their bone age and their parents height. (Tanner el al 1975).

Since 1950, James Tanner pioneered in the use of growth hormone to treat children with short stature. Growth hormone was initiall y extracted from autopsy material, and supplies were scarce and impure, now it is genetically engineered and become more available, more pure, and less expensive. He was one of a handful of scientists who first suggested that growth data could be used and applied in fields like sociology, economics, garment industry, athletics, and ergonomics. The Department of growth and development, at the Institute of child health in London University had become a leading centre for research on human growth. The great advances in sonar methodology, and molecular biology have allowed researchers to go beneath the surface, and increased our knowledge about intra-uterine growth and detecting foetal disorders before birth.

Though, the great pioneers of human growth; Boas, shuttle worth, Bayley and Tanner, found ways in handling growth data without involving much statistical theory, subsequent advances have been increasingly dependent on the collaboration of professional statistician, and the use of the statistical theory.

Micheal Healy (1962), in London was the 1st statistician involved in the analysis of growth data with professor Tanner, the two become life-long collaborators. Healy produced statistical methods for designing, analyzing and fitting mathematical equations to longitudinal growth data. Roland Huspie, in Belgium, at the Free University of Brussels provided mathematical modeling for the human growth curve.

It is worth mentioning here, that more than a century ago in 1900; Karl Pearson wrote,

"I believe that the day must come, when the biologist will without being a mathematician, not hesitate to use mathematical analysis when he requires it ".

CHAPTER 2

STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN CELL

•   Growth and differentiation of the different cells of the body.

•   Growth of the different tissues and systems of the body.

•   Methods of growth

•   Chromosomes and sex differentiation.

CHAPTER 2

STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN CELL

T he cell is the smallest unit of living material that can live independently and perform all vital functions e.g secretion, respiration, absorption, reproduction, excretion, suction, conduction, contraction and growth. Its size varies from 4 micron to the largest cell which is the ovum 150 micron, advances in electron microscopy has helped to reveal more structural details of the cell quite unknown before. Cells are composed of 2 major components cytoplasm and nucleus, fig 5.

Fig 5, Structure of the human