One of the most famous scientists in the world, the British Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, warned in the summer of 1975 about the revolutionary ideas coming out of a laboratory in Madrid and going too unnoticed. A person is a being of 30 billion cells arranged, according to an inconceivable choreography, starting from a single fertilized egg. Those Spaniards, working with flies, had discovered that living organisms, after the multiplication of the first solitary cell, develop in modules, in watertight compartments regulated by a handful of genes: wings here, legs there, eyes there. No cell crosses those invisible boundaries, such as the one that marks the limit between the back of an arm and the front. The director of that laboratory, the Madrid biologist Antonio García-Bellido, one of the best scientists in the history of Spain, died this Monday at the age of 89.
The researcher said he was one of those children determined to “open the toy and see how it worked.” Having trained since 1959 in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States, García-Bellido opened his own laboratory in 1968 at the Biological Research Center of the Superior Council of Scientific Research, in Madrid. I wanted to find out how, from a single cell, a hand, a wing, an antenna is born. “The problem is how the shape is made, because organs have shape. It is a problem of cell populations, of what they say about having more or fewer cells in a dimension; and of size, which is specific to the species. It is still a great challenge to know how the genes that are in the cells cause the cell populations to have the dimensions prescribed by the genes, and how this information is transformed into size and shape”, reflected the biologist in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2006, on the occasion of his retirement.
The findings about flies have left scientists speechless. García-Bellido developed the concept of “selector genes”, a sort of conductors in DNA that are activated in every area of the body, defining the identity of cells in each compartment. If something goes wrong, a fly can have four wings instead of two. And the most surprising thing is that these main genes are interchangeable between absolutely different species. If you introduce the right human gene into a wingless mutant fly, it will grow wings.
The findings of García-Bellido’s laboratory, revealed to the world by Francis Crick and his colleague Peter Lawrence, had far-reaching implications. About 540 million years ago, during the so-called Cambrian explosion, the impressive diversity of animal types that today swarm the Earth emerged in a short period. The common ancestor must already possess that handful of selector genes, capable of organizing any body, be it equipped with wings or tentacles. For the biologist and EL PAÍS journalist Javier Sampedro, García-Bellido’s academic nephew, the Madrid laboratory ended up illuminating “the most surprising and enigmatic set of facts that genetics has discovered in its entire history, because it reveals that all the dazzling animal diversity of this planet, from carpet mites to Ministers of Culture via the clams and worms that parasitize them, are nothing more than small adjustments to a meticulous design plan that evolution invented only once, about 600 million years ago,” as he summarized in his book Deconstructing Darwin (Critical publishing house).
The 19th-century British naturalist Charles Darwin proposed that all living things evolved from the same common ancestor thanks to natural selection: among individuals of the same generation with small differences in inherited characteristics, those best adapted to the environment survived. The findings of García-Bellido and his colleagues highlighted the possibility of modular evolution, with sudden changes based on the appearance of new compartments regulated by the same ancestral selector genes. “Evolution is very conservative,” the biologist explained to this newspaper. “I jokingly say that evolution had very little imagination, it did not create new things, what it did was combine immediate results. (…) The biggest change in evolution is in which organisms the genes are expressed and when”, he reflected.
García-Bellido was one of only two Spaniards invited to join the Royal Society of the United Kingdom and the National Academy of Sciences of the United States at the same time. The other was his disciple Ginés Morata, with whom he began collaborating more than half a century ago. “Antonio García-Bellido was one of the very few scientific pioneers that Spain produced,” says Morata. “He was able to integrate the classical concepts of developmental biology with genetic analysis and, by making this synthesis, he created a Spanish school of developmental biology that has had great international projection and continues to have it. It is truly a great loss for Spanish science”, laments the disciple.
The biologist Alfonso Martínez Arias published a brief history of Spanish genetics 15 years ago, in which the epigraphs were illustrative: the pioneers, the Civil War, Antonio García-Bellido. “Antonio was probably the most important Spanish biologist after Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Severo Ochoa. I would dare say that, intellectually, much more than Ochoa,” says Martínez Arias, of the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona.
García-Bellido was “the most successful living Spanish scientific researcher”, according to the University of Malaga, to which he donated 75 boxes of his documents. The Madrid biologist had been a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences since 1984, winner in the same year of the Prince of Asturias Prize and the National Research Prize in 1995. His “terrible genius, a so-called impossible character”, as the journalist Malén Aznárez told him in that 2006 interview, was also known. they deserved it more,” concluded García-Bellido.
