Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
Developmental biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1995
Germany · b. 1942
Science and medicine
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.
12 answers
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.
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.
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