Biomedicine, epigenetics and new lines of research

Abstract

Conrad Waddington was an English embryologist who in the 1950s proposed the concept of "epigenesis" to refer to the way in which genes interact with their environment, making their phenotype manifest. He was intrigued how it was possible that from a single cell, the zygote, generated a structured organism, composed of millions of different cells with different specializations, despite sharing, all, the same genome. What was the explanation of that cell differentiation? (in the human animal, for example, there are 220 cell types).