Viktor Hamburger and Experimental Embryology

Viktor Hamburger (1900-2001) was one of the most important and influential embryologists of the twentieth century. Educated in Germany under Hans Spemann at the University of Freiburg, as a graduate student Hamburger employed the techniques of embryonic tissue transplantation in amphibians that formed the laboratory’s basic research methodology. Hamburger later took that approach to the United States where he applied it to chick embryos, the organism on which all his future research was based.