Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

In more advanced organisms, life begins when a fertilized egg divides and forms new cells that in turn divide and segment off to make up the heart, brain, hair for example. Genes regulate this process. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, a German developmental biologist, studied the development of fruit flies and, around 1980, succeeded in identifying and classifying the 15 genes that direct the cells to form a new fly. She won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for this groundbreaking work.