Epithelium and Skins

So today in my Developmental Biology class we were learning about some of the various experiments and effects of over or underexpressing certain soluble factors. And it made me think of how intuitive this was, much in the similar manner to creating a skin for a computer program. When you take apart a template as such, you can begin to see how the pieces work immediately and as you make small tinkerings (changing numbers in the XML script, for instance) to larger ones (changing full lines or blocks of code), it is very much similar to messing with developing embryos to see what fate certain actions bring. This is the same with any kind of coding really, but I really got the same feel as I feel these scientists did yesterday when I was editing parts of the skin for my new modded XBox.