Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos

The title Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields elucidates the three central metaphors that author Donna Haraway uses to track the paradigm shift in developmental biology that occurred from the late 1890s to the mid-1950s. This was a time of fruitful discovery and unparalleled crisis in the field of biology in which Haraway pinpoints a paradigm shift that fits the construct outlined by Thomas S. Kuhn in his well-known book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.