Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard is a German developmental biologist whose systematic genetic screens in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster identified the genes that control the body plan of the developing embryo. Working with collaborators, she identified roughly fifteen genes responsible for the segmented pattern of the fly larva and, more broadly, found roughly 120 genes essential to early embryonic development out of about 5,000 genes tested, work that established the genetic logic by which an embryo overall structure is laid out. Her research also contributed to the discovery of the Toll gene, originally found for its role in fly development, which later proved central to the discovery of toll-like receptors in the animal immune system. She shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis for discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development, and is the only woman from Germany to have received a Nobel Prize in the sciences. She earned her doctorate at the University of Tubingen in 1974, directed the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tubingen from 1984 to her 2014 retirement, and founded a foundation in 2004 supporting young female scientists with children.