Gluing life together. Computer simulation in the life sciences: an introduction.

Over the course of the last three decades, computer simulations have become a major tool of doing science and engaging with the world, not least in an effort to predict and intervene in a future to come. Born in the context of the Second World War and the discipline of physics, simulations have long spread into most diverse fields of enquiry and technological application. This paper introduces a topical collection focussing on simulations in the life sciences.

Model and movement: studying cell movement in early morphogenesis, 1900 to the present.

Morphogenesis is one of the fundamental processes of developing life. Gastrulation, especially, marks a period of major translocations and bustling rearrangements of cells that give rise to the three germ layers. It was also one of the earliest fields in biology where cell movement and behaviour in living specimens were investigated.

Animating embryos: the in toto representation of life.

With the recent advent of systems biology, developmental biology is taking a new turn. Attempts to create a 'digital embryo' are prominent among systems approaches. At the heart of these systems-based endeavours, variously described as 'in vivo imaging', 'live imaging' or 'in toto representation', are visualization techniques that allow researchers to image whole, live embryos at cellular resolution over time.

Folding into being: early embryology and the epistemology of rhythm.

Historians have often described embryology and concepts of development in the period around 1800 in terms of "temporalization" or "dynamization". This paper, in contrast, argues that a central epistemological category in the period was "rhythm", which played a major role in the establishment of the emerging discipline of biology. I show that Caspar Friedrich Wolff's epigenetic theory of development was based on a rhythmical notion, namely the hypothesis that organic development occurs as a series of ordered rhythmical repetitions and variations.

[Picture metamorphosis. The transformation of insects from the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century].

The paper discusses the history of research into the problem of insect metamorphosis from the middle of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In particular, the work of three central figures is discussed: Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680), Pierre Lyonet (1706-1789) and Johann Moritz David Herold (1790-1862). It is argued that an understanding of the history of the problem of metamorphosis requires a careful analysis of its pictorial dimension.