Wieschaus, Eric F (1947– )

US geneticist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1995 with Edward Lewis and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard for their discoveries concerning the genes that control the early stages of the body's development.

Inspired by the work of Lewis, Wieschaus and Nüsslein-Volhard, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, set out in 1978 to identify the clusters of genes which determine the development of the individual body parts of fruit flies. They fed adult flies chemicals that cause mutations in the genetic DNA. They then bred the flies and looked for abnormal embryos. By checking back to the parent flies, they were able to pinpoint the genes responsible for different mutations. By 1980 they had identified 139 developmental genes, which fell into several classes. One class caused whole body segments to be missing; another class caused defects in every second body segment. Similar principles are now known to control the development of other species, including humans.