UW Biologist Has Eye on the Prize

The cells in this fruit fly were directed in a laboratory to develop an eye on the fly's antenna (highlighted area.) Georg Halder, a post-doctoral fellow in molecular biology, won a 1997 Pharmacia Biotech & Science Prize for his discovery at the University of Basel in Switzerland that a single gene in fruit flies is responsible for triggering the development of eyes.

Georg Halder loves rocks and he’s captivated by the Sahara desert, a sea of sand where the only rocks in sight fell from space.

But it’s Halder’s acumen as a biologist and his discovery of a master eye-building gene that will enable him to indulge his exotic scientific side interest: exploring the Sahara.

Halder, a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of UW–Madison molecular biologist Sean Carroll, was named this week (Dec. 4) as one of four young scientists in the world to receive the Pharmacia Biotech & Science Prize for 1997.

“I’m fascinated with the Sahara,” said Halder displaying a few of the unusual rocks collected during a previous trip to North Africa. “I’d like to go back.”

Now Halder, 30, will be able to pursue his passion for exploration with the help of a cash award of $5,000 that will accompany the prize.

He was recognized for an achievement that was as shocking as it was controversial: As a graduate student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, Halder showed that a single gene in fruit flies is responsible for activating the developmental program for the eye. With that knowledge, Halder was able to direct cells at virtually any place on the body of the fly to develop into eyes.

His discovery, published in 1995 in the journal Science, has important implications for modern molecular biology and fuels an ongoing scientific controversy over whether the genes responsible for such things as eye development and limb formation in virtually all animals – including humans – have been conserved and passed down through the ages from a common ancestor.

“It’s no longer nature’s secret that many proteins involved in basic mechanisms of development are highly conserved between organisms as different as humans and flies,” Halder said. Nevertheless, he said finding that essentially the same gene governed eye development in flies and mammals was a big surprise.

Similar genes have now been found in other groups of animals as diverse as squid and flat worms.

Halder and other scientists now think that eyes themselves evolved once in a common ancestor of all the animals that have eyes, and that nature’s large diversity of eyes evolved from that primitive eye.

The graphic evidence of Halder’s discovery, working eyes growing on antennas, legs and wings were flashed around the world and caused a sensation well beyond the laboratory.

The Pharmacia Biotech & Science Prize, sponsored jointly by Swedish biotech giant Pharmacia and Science magazine, was established to provide support for scientists at the beginning of their careers.

Halder will be honored at a Dec. 9 ceremony in Uppsala, Sweden. The ceremony will coincide with Nobel Prize festivities in Stockholm.