The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
born 1947 · South Bend, 1947 – 1953, and Notre Dame, 1965 – 1969
The fame: Eric Wieschaus shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — with Edward B. Lewis and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard — "for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development": the work, done with Nüsslein-Volhard at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, that identified the genes by which a fruit-fly egg organizes itself into a segmented embryo, a foundation of modern developmental biology. He became a professor at Princeton, where he holds the Squibb Professorship in molecular biology.
The tie, exactly: The South Bend chapter of this life is real twice over, and his Nobel autobiography is the source for both halves. He was born in South Bend on June 8, 1947, and lived here until the family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1953, when he was six. Then he came back: after John Carroll High School in Birmingham he returned to South Bend for the University of Notre Dame (B.S. 1969), and it was in Professor Harvey Bender's Drosophila laboratory at Notre Dame that he first encountered the fruit fly — the organism of his life's work. The doctorate is Yale's (1974) and the prize work is Heidelberg's; the birth and the first formation in the science are this city's.
A small conflict: A Birmingham reference lists the birth date as June 7. The Nobel Foundation's own facts page and Wieschaus's autobiography give June 8, 1947, and that governs here.
Sources:
- NobelPrize.org, Eric Wieschaus facts page and autobiographical account — the South Bend birth (June 8, 1947), the 1953 move to Birmingham, the Notre Dame degree, the Bender laboratory, the 1995 prize and its citation.
- Birmingham reference listing — the June 7 variant, carried as a conflict.