Marta Shahbazi Alonso (left), a rising star in embryology, and Tamara González Costa, who studied heart development, were killed in one of the worst train disasters in Europe in recent times. Credit: MRC LMB/Michael Thornton (L), IMBA Graphics Dept./Hannes Tkadletz (R)

Scientists are mourning the tragic deaths of two developmental biologists who were killed in a train crash in Spain on 28 October.

Marta Shahbazi Alonso, a 41-year-old stem-cell and developmental biologist at the prestigious MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, and Tamara González Costa, a 31-year-old postdoc at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) in Vienna, died in a high-speed train collision near the town of Urda in central Spain.…