Julienne Rutherford, University of Illinois, Chicago
CANCELLED – Friday, 18 March 2016, EMBL Heidelberg
Julienne Rutherford, University of Illinois, Chicago
The infinite foetus: connecting person and placenta through time and space
Abstract
The foetus as a biological entity has labile boundaries. 1) It is an individual with its own genome, but that genome is the collaborative output of two other individuals, which in turn exponentialises into past generations. 2) The watery world in which it develops also has a temporal signature that reaches into the past and extends beyond gestation, through phenomena that conceptually coalesce within the Developmental Origins Paradigm. 3) The foetus as an entity does not exist without its placenta. While the placenta is an extrasomatic foetal organ it must be conceptually incorporated with the foetus as the biological bridge between generations. A biological view of the foetal experience that is restricted to the time and space of the foetus’s body alone is inadequate to fully situate individuals, communities, and species within the intergenerational ecologies they create and inhabit. Framing the foetus as the fruit of previous generations and the seed from which future generations grow gives rise to a biology of life history that is Moëbian rather than linear. Data and impressions from Dr. Rutherford’s work with marmoset monkeys, vervet monkeys, and humans will illuminate the themes discussed above.
Biography
Dr. Rutherford earned her PhD in biological anthropology from Indiana University in 2007. Her outside concentrations were in animal behavior and anatomical sciences, an integrative background that has shaped her expansive perspective of individual biology. Dr. Rutherford is an Assistant Professor of Women, Children, and Family Health Science in the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, serving masters level midwifery and women’s health nurse practitioner students and advising PhD students. All of her research questions revolve around a central interest in the dynamic maternal environment in which a foetus develops. She is primarily focused on the primate placenta as a signalling interface between mother and foetus, working with both humans and nonhuman primates to address the effects of maternal ecology on placental morphology, metabolic function, and gene expression, and the downstream sequelae for offspring health both postnatally and later in life. Dr. Rutherford is the PI of an NIH-funded grant titled “Womb to Womb: programming reproduction in female marmoset monkeys.” She is also the PI of a study that seeks to connect placental morphology and function to foetal brain development in the vervet monkey.