Christiane (Janni) Nüsslein-Volhard was born in Magdeburg, Germany, on 20 October 1942.
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was born on 20 October 1942 in Magdeburg, Germany, during the tumult of the Second World War. She was the second of five children in a cultured, artistically-inclined family; her father was an architect and her mother a painter and musician who fostered a lively intellectual household.
Her childhood, spent partly amid the hardships and displacements of wartime and postwar Germany, nonetheless instilled in her an early fascination with plants and animals. She has often recounted how she decided by around age twelve that she wanted to understand how organisms develop from a single cell into a complex being — a question that would become the guiding thread of her entire scientific career.
This early curiosity, combined with a rigorous secondary education and later university training in biology, biochemistry, and physics in Frankfurt and Tübingen, set the foundation for her path into developmental genetics. Her birth in the modest surroundings of wartime Magdeburg belies the eventual global significance of her contributions: she would go on to become one of the most celebrated developmental biologists in history and the first German woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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