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Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Developmental biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1995

Germany · b. 1942

Developmental biologist and director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen. Shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Eric Wieschaus and Edward Lewis for identifying genes that control segmentation in the Drosophila embryo. The screens she and Wieschaus ran at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in 1979 and 1980 became a standard method in the field.

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How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
As I was lazy and rarely did my homework, I finished high school with a rather mediocre exam. I almost did not pass in English language. Recently, my previous teachers allowed me to see their report on my high school performances, which included the following statements: Despite the fact that her talents are rather equally spread among many areas of knowledge, her performances are rather different depending on the distribution of her interests. Thus, with her strong display of self will she can be decidedly lazy in some topics over years, while in her areas of interests she performs to a degree far extending that required for normal school purposes.

Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 1995 source

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What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong?
I continued the work on dorsal, discovered the recessive phenotype and interpreted the phenotype postulating a gradient determining the dorsoventral axis. At that time, gradients were not widely accepted as mechanisms, in particular biochemists were highly sceptical, however the Tübingen influence made such models attractive to me.

Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 1995 source

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Whose work makes you jealous?
I felt at the time that Eric was much more successful than I, he was extremely productive during his time in Zurich, and worked on many very original projects, germ line, cell lineage, sex determination, where not many people could follow him. I also had the impression that I was dependent on him because he had more fly experience and without him I would not have gotten the job. This made our start in Heidelberg a little difficult, until we sorted things out, and from then on we thoroughly enjoyed working in the same lab.

Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 1995 source

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