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Passion is important for science, you should choose a topic that really fascinates you

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, was made honoris causa by UPF.
22.07.2022

Imatge inicial

El passat 12 de juliol Cristiane Nüsslein-Volhard, hristiane Nüsslein-Volhard, a specialist in developmental biology and Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, was made honoris causa by UPF.

The UPF has recognised the achievements of an outstanding researcher, who has contributed to our basic understanding of embryonic development. Her work has helped to identify the genes that control development in living organisms, shedding light on large areas of biology and medicine.

 

—What does it mean for you to be recognized with honoris causa at UPF?

Well, it’s nice to be recognized and it’s nice to know that people care for me.

 

—What got you interested in developmental biology and genetics in the first place?

I wondered how from an egg, which looks totally uniform, a very complex organism can develop in a very short time and I wondered which clues are already present in the egg that guide these developmental decisions. And so we looked for the genes that would change the informational content of the egg and we were successful.

 

—What are the most important skills to be a good scientist?

I think a certain degree of intelligence is important, and also passion, you really have to be very interested in the topic and you have to choose the topic yourself. Because if you just do research on something which someone else has told you should look at, the intensity of research is very different. So you should choose something which keeps you awake at night, this is very important. And it’s hard work of course, you cannot get good results without putting in a lot of work, and you have to know that.

 

 

—What has been the best part of being recognized with a Nobel?

I think the recognition for my field was very important. And for the people who work in developmental biology it also was very important that the topic was recognized. And otherwise, being famous has its positive and its negative aspects.

 

—What do you think are the most important challenges in developmental biology nowadays?

At present people are very much concerned with small, very detailed steps in differentiation and development. Modern methods involve physics and a lot of bioinformatics to unravel these steps. There are some breakthroughs that have taken place in the past ten years or so which have proved very useful because they opened new avenues in developmental biology. One for example is whole genome sequencing, new methods of performing very rapid sequencing of whole organisms.

And then another breakthrough I think has been wonderful for developmental biology is this new CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing method, which you can now apply to model organisms. You can make mutants in almost any organism if you can insert these components into the egg or into the tissue. This is revolutionary for developmental biology and it is just starting to open challenging, new paths for research.

Much of the understanding of life has been found out by people who were very curious to understand particular aspects that were not motivated by utility but due to the curiosity that arose from the fascinating object.

—What part of scientific work do you enjoy the most?

I love working in the lab actually, it is a pity when the lab is getting bigger and bigger and you have more people to supervise and you have other duties you cannot do experiments anymore because you don’t have enough uninterrupted time. But I still love looking at people’s original data.

 

—In your opinion, why is basic research so important?

Basic research is not oriented towards the solution of a particular problem but is sort of curiosity driven. So you wonder about something and you want to understand it and if you choose a topic which is interesting and fundamental in biology it will probably result in something which is also very useful at the end. But if you try to solve a problem directly it often fails because you miss out on many other things.

Much of the understanding of life has been found out by people who were very curious to understand particular aspects that were not motivated by utility but due to the curiosity that arose from the fascinating object. And these many discoveries also ended up in eventually understanding diseases and helping to discover new medicines. So, for example, we discovered genes in the fly which are now used in developmental medicine, but we had no idea about that of course. 

 

—How did the idea of ​​creating the CNV-Foundation come about?

Well, hard work is needed in science. You need time to do research and if you have children and you have a lot of things to do in your household, it’s good to have some money to buy extra time.

 

—What is your view on the relationship between art and science?

What is common to art and science is that creativity is required, you have to have a sense for novel things and rely on your own thoughts and input. But in contrast to arts, where individuals produce objects which will always be associated with their own name, in science with time discoveries become impersonal, because they could have been made by someone else. Because the aim is to understand nature and it is the same for everyone, so it’s not so attached to an individual.

 

 

—Could you tell us about your interest in the beauty of nature?

I think this is common to many of us, everybody appreciates the beauty of nature. We love to look at beautiful objects in nature, and animals are sometimes so very, very beautiful and you wonder how this beauty is possible. We are fascinated by birds’ colouration and by fishes’ stripes and so on, and when I started working with fish that have these beautiful stripes, you really start to wonder how they are built and this is not known. And it is not known for tigers’ stripes either, but it’s strange that so little is known. So this was my goal for my last research area, very focused on this.

I think this is common to many of us, everybody appreciates the beauty of nature. We love to look at beautiful objects in nature, and animals are sometimes so very, very beautiful and you wonder how this beauty is possible. 

—Would you give any advice for young researchers?

It’s a wonderful job if you love making discoveries. If you don’t enjoy that very much you shouldn’t do it, I mean this is the reward, being able to understand something which you didn’t understand at the beginning. To have your curiosity sort of solved gives great enjoyment. One piece of advice is that you should choose a topic that really fascinates you, which is important enough and it will bring interesting results. And if you are not prepared to work hard you shouldn’t go into science.       

 

 

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