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
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?
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.
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.
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