Born: Oct 20, 1942, Magdeburg, Germany
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard German geneticist and Nobel Prize winner, was born in Magdeburg, Germany. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Tübingen, Germany in 1973. From 1978 to 1980, she teamed up with American geneticist Eric F. Wieschaus at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, where they performed groundbreaking developmental research on fruit fly embryos. For their research, Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus received the 1995 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. They shared the prize with Edward B. Lewis, an American geneticist who had researched a slightly later stage of embryonic development.
Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus shared interest in embryonic development. They chose the common fruit fly (Drosophila) as their research subject because the fly’s brief nine-day life span enables scientists to study genetic mutations in multiple generations. As is the same with all animals, the fruit fly starts life as a single cell, a fertilized egg. In short order, that cell divides into two cells, those two split into four cells, and so on. The cells are undifferentiated until there are 16 cells, but with the next split, the cells, under the control of genes, begin to specialize. It was this very early stage of development, when the organism goes from a newly fertilized egg to a segmented embryo, that interested Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus.
Using a systematic genetic technique called saturation screening, Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus set out to identify the genes that control the initial segmentation process of development. The two scientists spent more than a year sitting at a special two-person microscope, studying and catalouging fruit-fly genes after they had carefully and systematically mutated (damaged or altered) them. Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus found 15 genes that, if mutated, would cause various defects in the body’s segmentation. They discovered that the genes could be classified into three groups, each of which in turn influenced a stage of the embryonic development. The first group determined the front-to-back axis of the embryo, while the second group of genes controlled the division of the embryo into segments. The third gene group controlled the specialization of each segment in the embryo.
The developmental work of Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus is exceedingly important because the same principles and techniques are being used for studying the embryonic development of more complex organisms, such as humans.
Nüsslein-Volhard has lectured at Yale University and Harvard Medical School. In 1991, she received the prestigious Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.
