Born June 8th, 1947 in South Bend, Indiana; studied biology at Notre Dame University, South Bend, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; 1974, Ph.D. at Yale; 1975-1978, researched at the Zoological Institute of the University of Zurich; 1978-1981, head of a research group at the European Molecular-Biological Laboratory in Heidelberg; investigated with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard the genetic controlling of embryonic development in systematic mutation experiments on fruit flies.

Nobel Prize for Medicine 1995 together with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development; many of the findings from their experiments with the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly can be applied to hereditary deformations in humans.