Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
She graduated from school in the year 1962 and wanted to study biology; although medicine interested her as well. In order to decide on her course of action, she enrolled in a month-long nursing course and decided against studying medicine. Till the year 1964, she dabbled between biology and physics trying to decide the best choice of career but she found biology boring while another course in physics turned out to be too tough after a point. Then, she came to a realisation that a new course in biochemistry was being taught at Tubingen and thus, she joined the university.
She graduated with a Diploma in Biochemistry in the year 1969 and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen in 1974 for her research into Protein–DNA interactions and the binding of RNA polymerase in Escherichia coli.
Genetics and developmental biology
She became the director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in 1985. In 1986, she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honor awarded in German research. In 1995, she shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, for “their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development.”
Finding the crucial genes:
In 1978, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and her counterpart, Eric Wieschaus began trying to find the decisive genes for the early embryonic development of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Their numerous and rapidly developing offspring make the fruit fly the ideal research subject, especially as genetically altered individuals (mutants) are easily detected. Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus produced and examined approximately 20,000 Drosophila mutants. As a result, they were able to find the 15 crucial genes.
Serving science and society:
Geneticist Edward Lewis pointed out the similarity between the genes of the fruit fly and human genes. Through her later work on zebrafish, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard gained valuable insights into the developmental genes of vertebrates. The similarity in the developmental genes of certain animals and humans is of significant interest to medical research and connected to hopes that this may provide new knowledge about the pathogenesis of cancer. Besides her concrete research work, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard also rendered outstanding services to science. In 2004, for instance, she established a foundation in her name which supports young mothers of all nationalities in their careers as researchers.