An interview with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. In 1995, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, along with Eric Wieschaus and Edward Lewis, for her work on the genetic control of embryogenesis using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In the 1990s, she transitioned her lab to working with zebrafish (Danio rerio), using similar forward genetic approaches to those that had proved so successful in Drosophila to uncover key regulators of vertebrate development. We met with Christiane at the recent International Society for Developmental Biology (ISDB) meeting in Singapore, to talk about her research, the impact of the Nobel Prize and the challenges of being a ‘woman in science’.