Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Christiane "Janni" Nüsslein-Volhard (born 20 October 1942) is a German developmental biologist, biochemist, molecular biologist, and geneticist, known for her research on the genetic control of embryonic development. She shared the 1991 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Edward B. Lewis and the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus.

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Quotes

... there are some various genes with simple causes, namely just one mutation and these are rare cases but these are the inherited diseases, monogenic inherited diseases, and this is actually true when you diagnose it. You know that this person, if the gene is defective in both copies, then you know you can predict with 100% certainty this child will be ill, and this type of diagnosis is of course valuable when it’s done, but the other type of predictions do not hold true because, as I said, traits depend on many genes and a gene has different effects on. So there are many diseases which are probably where you have a predisposition with a particular genetic background that you might get it more frequently than other people might get some diseases but it’s never totally predictable and this is why the diagnosis doesn’t really help you much.
- Interview with Professor Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard by freelance journalist Marika Griehsel at the 53rd meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany, 30 June-4 July 2003. nobelprize.org.

Setting up a screen in a new organism is a lot of work, but I like this kind of work – developing devices and tools that make things easier and more efficient. This was also the secret of success in the fly screen. It’s maybe my upbringing from home – we used to do handicrafts and make toys and I had quite some dexterity in this sense. Eric is also good at these things, so we invented a bunch of tools and tricks that made life much easier – little things like boxes with a grid for keeping fly stocks (rather than just holding them together with rubber bands as everyone did at the time), and a better system for collecting embryos on agar plates instead having to take them out of the food. And we found a particular type of oil that made embryos transparent so you could look through the chorion, which just made things so much easier and faster for screening.
With the fish it was a similar situation: we needed to be able to make all the processes as efficient as possible to do a large-scale screen. I went to Oregon, where zebrafish were quite well established as a model system, but realised that we couldn’t possibly do a screen with the way they raised fish – it was too laborious. So the first job – and it took two years or so – was to develop better aquarium and feeding systems and so on to streamline everything and allow us to scale up.
- as quoted by Katherine Brown in: (2017) . "An interview with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard". Development 144: 3851–3854. DOI:10.1242/dev.159582. (quote from p. 3852)

Quotes about Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

In the mid-1970s, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was struggling. Two years after finishing her PhD in molecular biology, she was working as a postdoctoral researcher in a lab she longed to leave. The new European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, had just turned her down for a job because she didn’t have enough experience working with the organism she wanted to study, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Worried she would soon be unemployed, Nüsslein-Volhard wrote to several scientists and “begged them to give me a job,” she recalled in a 2015 interview.
Then Nüsslein-Volhard got a break. EMBL decided to hire her after all, but she would have to share a small lab with another scientist—who turned out to be her friend and scientific sounding board Eric Wieschaus. The pair went on to carry out a landmark study, known as the Heidelberg screen, that for the first time pinpointed many of the genes that choreograph embryonic development.
- Mitchell Leslie, I Dreamt of Fruit Flies. Lasker Foundation (May 14, 2024).

External links

Encyclopedic article on Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard on Wikipedia
Media related to Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard on Wikimedia Commons