Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

I think a very big curiosity. I’m very curious and I like to understand things and not only science but also other things where I just try to find out why things work or how things work. Science and nature caught my attention as a small child already. I was growing up in a city but we had a garden and I loved the garden and then often on vacation I was at a farm and I loved these animals and plants and so on, so I was attracted very early on and then we had a very good teaching actually at my … I don’t know whether my teachers really had much of a role because I was determined very early, but then I also did music and I did languages and Literature and so on. I have broad interests actually other than science, but this is really true, this curiosity.

I don’t think it’s misused yet, people are afraid of it might be misused but on the other hand, there is also value in finding out about the relation between several particular predispositions. You might be more careful if you are told that your genetic background is such that you shouldn’t eat fat in large amounts or so, it does help you change your life a little bit and so it’s not so bad, but it’s hard to find out which genetic background is causing these things.

Not really. I thought that getting the Nobel Prize was a big interruption in my career, I thought and it was very distracting. It takes a lot of time you know, it just takes time to be honoured, you have to travel and you have to give speeches of things you have, oh it’s so often that you get bored to tears when you hear your own voice. And it’s really taking a lot of your time and there’s no way that during this time you can start something new, I mean you just profit from what you’ve done and there is no time to develop new ideas.

we had a wonderful education because my parents were so practical … Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard: Yes I mean, I have a strong likeness of culture and also I mean my grandmother was a painter and we do music in the family quite a lot and I think that’s very important. What was also important, I thought about that recently, also maybe as a follow-up of an interview but I was asked what my parents did and so on and looking at my brothers and sisters, we had a wonderful education because my parents were so practical, they did books themselves and we did a lot of handicrafts and I knew how to knit and sew and cook and we learnt a lot to do things ourselves, to make things ourselves so we all have some dexterity in doing things ourselves and this is also very important for Science

They were blocked in their minds to do this because they thought, oh this is not done, we don’t do that in our field and you can’t do that, and I said: Why not?

so I sometimes think, why should I talk young women into being a scientist if they then end up being sort of disliked or not accepted by their contemporaries and so it’s a tricky business actually.

we know the fish, we know the worm, we know the fly, but we don’t know the links between and we don’t know, when we go back to the branches in evolution, we really don’t know what happened there when they branched and how they divert and what is the major drive for evolution.

I sing yes sure and I garden, I have a large garden and I really recreate myself by doing gardening and thinking about something else so that when your mind gets free from all the burden of the daily troubles and then you can start putting something fresh in, you know.

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.

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.

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.

I immediately loved working with flies. They fascinated me, and followed me around in my dreams.