A Conversation with Eric Wieschaus

Eric Wieschaus, Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology at Princeton University, talks with Bonnie Bassler, his colleague at Princeton and the Editor of the Annual Review of Genetics, about his life and career. Dr. Wieschaus describes his beginnings as a young boy in Alabama, and recounts how his interest in science was sparked by a science camp in Kansas funded by the National Science Foundation when he was a teenager. After a bachelor's degree at Notre Dame, Dr. Wieschaus was admitted to graduate school at Yale University, where he studied under the direction of Swiss Developmental Biologist Walter Gehring. Dr. Gehring eventually returned to his home country, taking his student with him. In Basel, Dr. Wieschaus met Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, or "Janni," as he calls her, and together they began the work that defined their careers. Their research resulted in the identification of 139 genes that determine the development of fruit fly embryos (Drosophila melanogaster), a finding that earned them the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Edward B. Lewis.