Successful women are not liked. I think the biggest danger for women in science is colleagues who are not as good as you are.

Successful women are not liked. I think the biggest danger for women in science is colleagues who are not as good as you are.

I think women who are pretty certainly have an advantage in any field, in any profession. When a girl is born people still say: Oh, I'm glad that she is pretty. They don't look at whether she is intelligent.

The three of us have worked on the development of the small and totally harmless fruit fly, Drosophila. This animal has been extremely cooperative in our hands - and has revealed to us some of its innermost secrets and tricks for developing from a single celled egg to a complex living being of great beauty and harmony. ... None of us expected that our work would be so successful or that our findings would ever have relevance to medicine.

The drive to want to know is innate in people. You cannot influence this. I think in contrast it is harmful if you push kids too far in a particular direction.

I was raised with this idea of hard work and keeping doors open. To be able to choose what you want to do in the future. That was what we tried to tell our children, too.

Not everybody is talented for doing research. I think many women prefer to look for an easier job after their dissertations because it is very demanding. You have to be mobile. You have to move to different places for your post-doc training. And if you aren't successful, it isn't a very pleasant job, either.