Genetic Research Wins Princeton Professor Nobel Prize: Meet Dr. Eric Wieschaus

A Princeton University molecular biologist shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with two other scientists for discovering genetic mechanisms in fruit flies that explain how birth defects and miscarriages occur in humans.

Dr. Eric Wieschaus was chosen for one of the most prestigious awards in science, along with Dr. Christiane Nusslein-Volhard of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany and Edward Lewis of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In announcing the award on October 9, 1995, Sweden's Karolinska Institute praised the scientists for advances that "have achieved a breakthrough that will help explain congenital malformations in man."

Wieschaus and Nusslein-Volhard broke new ground in genetics through painstaking studies of fruit flies. Their research found that birth defects in flies are controlled by a handful of genes.

Their work, published in a seminal 1980 paper in Nature, established that genes controlling development could be systematically identified. It encouraged an entire generation of scientists to search for developmental genes in other subjects, including humans, according to the Swedish academy that bestowed the honor. The winners were honored on Dec. 10 at a ceremony in Stockholm, with laureates in other fields.

"Their research has stimulated other research in many other fields." said award committee member Bjorn Vennstrom, a professor at the Karolinska institute. Nusslein-Volhard and Wieschaus identified a number of genes crucial to development. In humans, such flaws are probably responsible for some early miscarriages and some of the roughly 40 percent of birth defects for which no cause is known, the Nobel citation said.Vennstrom said the work has helped give scientists and doctors a better understanding of how and why the body aborts embryos, a common occurrence for first-time mothers. Only about six of 20 fertilizations lead to children, and the abundance of miscarriages long has been an enigma, Vennstrom said.

"What we wanted to learn was how embryos develop from a single cell," Wieschaus recalled. "It is amazing that different regions of the embryo always develop the same way-certain cells develop as the head, others as the hand. This is one of the most fascinating scientific phenomena to try to understand. How can this possibly happen from a single fertilized egg cell?"

It was clear that genes somehow controlled the process, but which genes they were was unknown. They decided to use fruit flies, which are classic objects of genetic study because of their exceedingly rapid reproduction. They started a laborious "knockout" process, randomly mutating a single gene in a fruit fly and breeding a colony from a pair.

Eventually, they produced 40,000 such fly families. They found that most mutations had only minor effects on development. In 139 cases, however, extraordinary things happened. In some, there was no muscle, eye or head development.

Beginning in 1984, they showed that the genes that control human development are not so different from those studied in the fruit fly. "Some of these same genes we studied have turned out to play essential roles in human development," Wieschaus said.

Wieschaus was born in Indiana but grew up in Alabama. He always loved to draw, describing himself as a "visual person," a trait that has come in handy in the study of genetics, he said. He credited the federal National Science Foundation with sparking his love of science, pointing to a summer scholarship he won as a high school student that paid for an internship in a biologist's lab.

He earned his bachelor's degree from Notre Dame University his doctoral degree at Yale University. Wieschaus joined the Princeton faculty in 1981 and was named a Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology in 1993.

Wieschaus plans to devote his career to studying fruit flies-and all they offer to genetics. "You can't beat flies," he said. "I still see things that I don't understand. I look at it and don't know how to put it together. I can see spending the rest of my life trying to understand how genes affect the molecular processes in cells."