Profile of Norbert Perrimon.

Abstract

As a child, one of Norbert Perrimon’s first introductions to the scientific method came from his father. Perrimon’s father was interested in geology. “Often we would go to various areas in Normandy, where I grew up, and collect different types of soils, rocks, and fossils. I always found it quite interesting to see how from the collection of different bits and pieces, you could draw complex geological maps,” Perrimon says. Many years later, Perrimon would use a similar process to make his mark not in geology, but as a biologist working on the fruit fly, Drosophila . Norbert Perrimon. Photo courtesy of Norbert Perrimon. Signaling pathways control the proliferation of stem cells, shown here intermingled among large enterocytes in the Drosophila midgut epithelium. Photo courtesy of M. Markstein and N. Perrimon. Over a long and distinguished career, Perrimon combined different pieces of data collected from the study of various fruit fly mutants to map complex developmental and signaling pathways. In recognition of his discoveries in the field of Drosophila development and signaling, and for developing important genetic tools for studying fruit flies, Perrimon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. Now a professor of developmental biology and genetics at Harvard Medical School, Perrimon first started developing tools to study fruit fly genetics as a graduate student at the University of Paris. It was in the early 1980s that Perrimon first became interested in genetics as a tool to tackle questions in developmental biology and embryology. “I was looking for an organism where I could use genetics to study the complexity of the way animals form,” he says. “I started working in Drosophila because it is a great model system to apply genetics.” In 1981, he started his doctoral research studying fruit fly oogenesis in the laboratory of …