When I went through school, I was in a hurry. I was an economics major as an undergraduate, and I was a finance major in graduate school. I was in a hurry to succeed when I got out in the business world. I’m sorry I didn’t take more courses in the humanities and in history and in the arts.

My key message to her, as a nine-year-old, recently has been, “You don’t need to be friends with everyone, but you’re forced to respect everyone. And everyone doesn’t need to be friends with you, but everyone is forced to respect you.”

Only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods. You are a slave to your passions.

History was not written by men who predicted failure, who gave up their dreams, who abandoned their principles, who allowed their laziness to put their intelligence to sleep. If certain men at times were alone in seeking victory, they always had at their side the watchful spirit of their peoples, the faith and destiny of many generations.

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.

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.

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?

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.