Eric F. WieschausBorn 8 Jun 1947.American developmental biologist who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, with geneticists Edward B. Lewis and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, for discovering the genetic controls of early embryonic development. Wieschaus worked together with Nüsslein-Volhard examining mutations in 40,000 fruit fly families. They discovered (1980) that about 5,000 of the fly's 20,000 genes are important to embryonic development and about 140 are essential. They formed the widely accepted model that three sets of genes control subdivision in the developing embryo: gap genes, pair-rule genes and segment-polarity genes. Their work helped scientists to better understand congenital mutations in other animals, including humans. |
