Small Baltimore research center makes big breakthroughs

BALTIMORE - Tucked into a small wooded stretch just behind the Johns Hopkins University campus, about 100 scientists - and millions of flies, frogs, mice and worms - are quietly changing the face of medicine.

The Carnegie Institution Department of Embryology, the most isolated of the institution's six research branches, bred this year's Nobel Prize winner for Physiology/Medicine; a winner of the 2006 Lasker Prize - known as the "American Nobel" - as well as thousands of other discoveries in its 93-year history.

Embryology is located on the back loop of a small winding road that borders the back of the Johns Hopkins' Homewood...