★Awarded a star by Kirkus Reviews for "remarkable merit"
Leonardo Da Vinci is best known as the artist who painted the Mona Lisa, arguably the most famous painting in history. Leonardo also drew The Fetus in the Womb, a masterpiece of human embryology depicting what he called "the great mystery," the mystery of how the human body is made.
Leonardo the anatomist, embryologist and neuroscientist revealed new worlds by scalpel, pen, and candlelight, worlds forbidden to explore by reigning authorities. Never before had the body been subjected to such powerful examination. Never before had the particulars of what we are made of and how we work been rendered in such detail: how we breathe, how we move, how we sense our world, how we nourish and repair and re-create ourselves.
The Stem Cell Dilemma
Leonardo da Vinci, The Fetus in the Womb, circa. 1511. The Royal Collection/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Leonardo could not have imagined as he examined the umbilical cord attaching the fetus to the mother was that it is a treasure trove of stem cells.
