Christiane (Janni) Nüsslein-Volhard is our representative in the wider world. Along with Eric Wieschaus and Ed Lewis, she was the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology, which was awarded for her genetic screens on Drosophila that led to the discovery of most of the genes that control development, not just in Drosophila, but in all animals.FIG1
Her book Coming to Life was published in German in 2004, and is now issued as an English edition by Yale University Press. It is an account of modern developmental biology written for a general audience. In effect, it is a summary of the great endeavour that the readers of Development are engaged in, and with which some of us have been occupied for a very long time. She describes accounts of animal development written before the 1980s as:`rather voluminous, full of highly complicated experiments'. Her work, and that of...
