Hers is a story of relentless determination and embracing every opportunity that was offered to her by a number of institutions. She was trained to become a High School Teacher at PUCE, at the time when President John F. Kennedy started the
Alliance for Progress Program with Latin America. Some equipment and a few professors were sent to Ecuador to help in the training of high school science teachers. One of her professors, Dr. Cándida Acosta, encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to do graduate studies in the United States of America. She received a scholarship from the Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities (LASPAU) and an international fellowship from the American Association of University Women for her graduate studies in the US. Eugenia obtained a Master of Science from
Vassar College and went on to
Emory University in
Atlanta to obtain a Ph.D with a great mentor, Asa Alan Humphries, Jr. Her dissertation dealt with the role of the egg-jelly on the fertilization of
Xenopus laevis. Upon returning to Ecuador in 1972 she became professor of Biology at
PUCE, her original University in Quito, and developed her scientific career in Ecuador. Through her,
Developmental Biology blossomed in a most unlikely place: Not having any funds to buy
Xenopus laevis, she came across a frog, called
Gastrotheca riobambae, in the very gardens of her University. A frog that she developed into a premier system to study the evolution of developmental adaptations.
Gastrotheca is a marsupial frog that carries its eggs in a pouch on her back, where they are pushed in by the male with his hindlimbs. This terrestrial form of reproduction solely occurs in the Latin American frogs of the family Hemiphractidae. Out of the intense competition for reproductive sites in the South American rainforest had evolved over 90 species of these frogs, in which the female incubates her embryos inside her body bringing parallelism to mammalian reproduction. Traditional frogs and marsupial frogs also differ in how their embryos excrete waste. Free-swimming tadpoles excrete ammonia, which would be toxic if accumulated in close quarters. Eugenia del Pino discovered that marsupial frog embryos excrete urea instead of ammonia. She discovered that addition of urea, which reaches high levels in the pouch, allows eggs to develop outside of the marsupial frog mother. Urea is a nitrogenous waste product that marsupial frog embryos use for water retention under the water stress conditions of the maternal pouch. Eggs of these frogs are very large, ranging from 3 to 10 mm in diameter in different species, and contain the nutrients needed for development up to metamorphosis. She found that
Gastrotheca develops much like a chick embryo on the surface of the yolk. However, instead of a primitive streak there is a circular blastopore surrounded by an embryonic disc. Surprisingly, extension starts only after involution at the
blastopore is concluded, demonstrating that these important movements can be dissociated from gastrulation itself. Her analyses revealed extensive modularity in the developmental processes that guide the blastopore closure and
notochord elongation in amphibians, features that correlate with reproductive modes and ecological adaptations. and branchial arches. Part of the neural crest becomes the "bell gills" that form a rich network of capillaries that surround the embryo in the pouch and exchange gases with the maternal circulation, while still separated by the egg envelope. This is a kind of amphibian version of a placenta without a uterus. Eugenia del Pino studied many other marsupial frogs and found a Venezuelan one called
Flectonotus pygmaeus that has adapted to its large egg by having oocytes that at early stages have up to 3000 meiotic nuclei in a single cell. The many nuclei are gradually lost until in the mature yolky oocyte only a single one remains, forming a single germinal vesicle. Eugenia's discovery of the amazing biological adaptations of marsupial frogs lead to a famous
Scientific American Article in 1989. Her work brought her election to the Latin American Academy of Sciences,
The World Academy of Sciences for the Advancement of Science in Developing Countries, and in 2006 she became the first member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA == Teaching and contributions to society ==