The Dr. Theodore G. and Jessica Obenchain Endowed Chair in Developmental Biology was established by Dr. Ted Obenchain, a 2023 recipient of Boise State University’s prestigious Distinguished Alumni Award.

It was in 1957 when freshman student Theodore G. Obenchain first enrolled in a basic course in embryology at Boise Junior College, and began to gain some understanding of this fascinating subject. While the general phases of fertilization, blastulation, gastrulation and neurulation were all well recognized in the 1950s, virtually nothing was known concerning the “automatic” forces that drove the process onward from the blastula stage through establishing polarity, bodily axes, the creation of germinal tissues and organogenesis. 

Over the next 65 years, truly dramatic details concerning all the vital stages of development have been elucidated, including such processes as closure of the neural tube, incorporation of the notochord within the spinal complex, the building of the craniospinal axis with its segmenting somites, and cranial rhombomeres, to name but a few. While some of these forces may be of maternal origin early on, most are endogenously derived in the form of fetal inductive forces and regulatory proteins. These forces further define the germinal tissues, ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm. The role of the Spemann factor in neurulation is but one more fascinating aspect of these forces.
 
Dr. Obenchain is deeply appreciative of the first-class education he received at Boise Junior College, something that far exceeded his expectations given the small size and limited resources of a local community college. After graduating from Boise Junior College, Obenchain went on to the University of Utah Medical School, followed by further surgical specialty training. Obenchain then embarked on his 35-year career as a neurosurgeon. He was a pioneer of new surgical techniques that reduced pain, the use of pain medications, and hospital stays for certain spinal patients; and received patents for several surgical instruments. Dr. Obenchain served as president of the San Diego Academy of Neurological Surgeons, published more than 20 articles, and delivered multiple presentations at international conferences.

Since retirement, Obenchain has pursued a second career writing historical medical biographies. It is the donor’s hope that the Dr. Theodore G. and Jessica Obenchain endowment might in some way lead to a deeper understanding regarding both the above-normal developmental processes, as well as some of the accidents of development that result in a variety of congenital abnormalities.

As Dr. Obenchain now gazes in awe at how far developmental biology has progressed over these past six decades, he is most fascinated by those intricate developmental/regulatory factors that produce, early in embryogenesis, a properly proportioned craniospinal axis that forms around the notochord and neural tube. This early phase of neurulation, an especially critical point in time, is of special interest since developmental mistakes here in the primitive cerebral hemispheres, brainstem, or spinal cord with its primitive neurons, and neural crest cells may produce life-altering congenital abnormalities.