Eric Wieschaus

Eric Wieschaus is an American developmental biologist who, together with Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, carried out a systematic saturation mutagenesis screen of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, inducing mutations across the fly chromosomes to identify the genes governing early embryonic patterning. This work, conducted at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and later associated with what became known as the Heidelberg screen, established foundational principles for how a set of genes lays out the basic body plan of a developing embryo, principles that proved to apply well beyond flies to other animals including vertebrates. He shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nusslein-Volhard and Edward B. Lewis for discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development. Wieschaus earned degrees in biology from the University of Notre Dame and Yale University, held his first independent research position at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory beginning in 1978, and moved to Princeton University in 1981, where he became the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994.