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Date: October 9, 1995 
Contact: Public Health Service (301) 496-5133

"We congratulate Drs. Eric Wieschaus, Edward Lewis and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, on winning this year's Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. We are proud to have contributed research support to Drs. Wieschaus and Lewis for several decades.

"This basic research on the genes that control embryonic development, although based on the fruit fly, Drosophila, holds great promise for a deeper understanding of human development as well as increased information on the specific genes that when mutated may lead to birth defects.

"Each year in the United States, nearly 38,000 babies--about one percent of those born--die before the age of one, two-thirds during their first month of life. Birth defects are the major cause of illness or disability in infancy as well as of infant mortality.

"Drosophila is a valuable experimental model as it has many genes analogous to those of humans and has a rapid development from the embryo to complete fly. It is also easy to experimentally create mutations in Drosophila making it possible to learn more about the functions of specific genes."

NICHD has supported Dr. Edward Lewis for over 21 years and Dr. Eric Wieschaus received his first research support from NICHD in 1969. Dr. Wieschaus is currently an NICHD Merit Awardee in recognition of the outstanding scientific contribution of his basic research. The scientists have also received support from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).

Dr. Lewis is at the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Wieschaus is at Princeton University and Dr. Nusslein-Volhard is at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is one of the federally funded National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of the NIH, and himself a Nobel laureate, noted that of the 71 American Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine since 1945, 52, or more than two-thirds--either had worked at or were supported by the NIH before winning the prize.