54 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
PROFILE© THE FRANCIS CRICK INSTITUTEW
hen Marianne Bronner first learned about the neural
crest—a group of cells that form early in embryonic
development and give rise to most of the periph-
eral nervous system and facial skeleton—she had an epiphany.
“I just knew that that is what I wanted to study,” she says. Prior
to her personal revelation, Bronner struggled. “I didn’t know
what I wanted to do with my life,” she says. She had earned a
bachelor’s degree in biophysics from Brown University in 1975
and went to graduate school in the same field at Johns Hopkins
University. “Since I had a degree in biophysics, I figured that I
should go to graduate school in biophysics,” Bronner explains.
But when she took a developmental biology course at Hopkins,
she “fell in love.”
In that course, Bronner learned about Nicole Le Douarin’s
pioneering work, starting in 1969, combining embryonic quail
and chick cells to study their developmental fate. Le Douarin
“is the ‘grande dame’ of the neural crest field in developmental
biology and became a distant mentor to me because she was so
inspiring,” Bronner says. “Here was a successful female scientist
among the male-dominated science world.”
Bronner also found the neural crest to be a beautiful system
in which to examine early development. It was a smaller, defined
set of multipotent cells that seemed simpler to work with than
the entire fertilized egg. “Neural crest cells are highly potent
and able to migrate more than any other embryonic cell type
to form a diverse set of cell lineages,” she explains. “I wanted to
know how they did that, and knew that the answers would give
us clues on how organisms develop.”
Although she was fascinated by developmental biology, she
continued as a biophysics student at Hopkins and was able to
join a laboratory that studied the neural crest. When she fin-
ished her PhD, Bronner took her research on the neural crest
with her to start her own lab, first at the University of Califor-
nia, Irvine, and then at Caltech.AN EARLY UPROOTING
Bronner was born in 1952 in Budapest, Hungary. Her family
fled the country just after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising—a
revolt by Hungarian citizens against the Soviet Union. Bron-
ner was four and her brother only two months old when her
family crossed the Hungarian border into Austria with only
the clothes on their backs. “We were stopped by soldiers at
the border and fortunately for us, the soldiers turned out to be
Austrian,” Bronner says.Bronner’s parents were Holocaust survivors, which influenced
their decision to risk leaving Hungary after the uprising, she says.
In Austria, Bronner’s father—trained as an engineer—worked at
a gas station to provide for his family. After six months, the
family immigrated to the US, first settling in Cleveland, where
they had cousins and where there was a Hungarian commu-
nity. While there, Bronner’s father got a master’s degree in
physics from John Carroll University and then found a job at
the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in New Jersey. Bronner’s
mother, who had worked as a dental hygienist in Hungary, also
worked at Princeton, as a librarian at the university’s chemis-
try laboratory.
Bronner says her parents’ decision to leave Hungary had a
huge influence on her. “I think it’s the reason why I care so much
about being a mentor for other scientists. Coming from a com-
munist country like I did, where the opportunities for scientists,
and especially women, were very limited, having the opportu-
nity to come to the US opened up a whole new world for me,”
she says. “I feel like I owe the world something, and so I take my
mentorship [role] very seriously.”
Of course, the opportunities Bronner had in the US
weren’t immediately obvious to her as a teenager. Life in
high school, she says, was “relaxing,” because the high school
she attended was not very good. To make up for her less-
than-stellar secondary education, she entered Brown Uni-
versity in Rhode Island in 1971 and loaded up on physics,
math, and chemistry courses, finally settling on a biophysics
major. “I created a curriculum for myself that was compara-
ble to that at Caltech, which in hindsight was not very smart.
There were only two of us that did a biophysics major, among
the hardest majors you could imagine,” she says. If Bronner
were able to do college over again, she says that she would
enjoy herself more—and also take more literature and writ-
ing courses. “I always tell my undergraduate students to take
English courses because, as a scientist, you spend the major-
ity of your time writing.”THE MIGHTY CHICK EMBRYO
After graduating from Brown in 1975, Bronner continued her
studies in biophysics at Johns Hopkins, joining Alan Cohen’s
laboratory so she could study the neural crest. “He asked me
if I could finish my thesis in two years without explaining to
me that he was planning on leaving science to pursue a career
in medicine. ‘Sure, why not!’ I naively replied,” Bronner says.Marianne Bronner investigates how neural crest cells in the embryo develop into a multitude
of cell lineages, including peripheral neurons, smooth muscle, and bone.BY ANNA AZVOLINSKYDiscovery’s Crest