So under Hoppy I became a biochemist, and became interested in organic syntheses,and then I found that the developing hen’s egg was nothing less than a marvellous chemical factory in which a great deal is synthesized during its three weeks of activity.However,it was one thing to trace the formation of substances like inositol or ascorbic acid during embryonic development,but quite another to face up to the problems of the morphological construction of the embryo from the original fertilised egg cell. That was how I became deeply involved in agitating philosophical questions.In the very same year that Chemical Embryology was published,the first experiments were made which showed that the primary induction centre in the amphibian embryo is stable to boiling.This study of what I called “morphogenetic hormones” led to another book,Biocbemistry and Morphogenesis,ten years later.

所以，在Hoppy的影响下，我成了一个生物化学家，而且我对有机合成很感兴趣，然后我发现鸡蛋的孵化正是一个奇妙的化学工厂，在这里经过三个星期的活动合成了了不起的东西。然而，一方面要追踪它在胚胎生长期间的组成物质比如纤维醇或抗坏血酸维生素C，另一方面，要面对从一个原始的受精卵变来的胚胎在形态学上的结构组成的问题。这就是使我深深陷入混乱的哲学问题的原因。正是在那一年，《胚胎化学》出版了，最初做的实验都只说明了两栖动物的初级胚胎诱导中心到沸点时也能保持稳定。这项被我称为“形成基因的荷尔蒙”的研究10年后把我领向了另一本书，《生物化学与形态形成》