[Feature] Pushing the limit
In 2006, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz was pregnant, unexpectedly, at age 42. A genetic test of the fetal portion of the placenta showed that roughly a third of the cells carried a serious abnormality: an extra copy of chromosome 2. The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom professor's specialty, developmental biology, was suddenly personal. Nature could hardly have come up with a more vivid irony. Zernicka-Goetz is not only a developmental biologist; she has spent more than a decade working in mice to pinpoint when and how cells in an early embryo start to differentiate. Her child's health depended in part on a question that had already captivated her as a scientist, she recalls: How much flexibility does the developing embryo retain? While still pregnant and uncertain about her baby's fate, Zernicka-Goetz started mouse work that led to a paper this March revealing new details about embryos' remarkable ability to cope with faulty cells. In May, she caught the attention of other...