Ernst Peter Fischer

Born 1947 in Wuppertal (Germany), married, two daughters; undergraduate student in mathematics and physics at the University of Cologne, diploma in 1972; graduate student in biology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (USA), PhD in 1977 under the supervision of Max Delbrück; post-doc at the universities of Freiburg and Constance in biochemistry and biophysics, switch to the history of science upon a request by Delbrück who was contemplating to write his autobiography when he became termi-nally ill; habilitation in the history of science in 1987; professor of the history of science at the university of Constance since 1994; also visiting professor at the university of Basel (Switzerland) lecturing on the history of genetics.

Author of several books (most of them translated into several languages) (small selec-tion): Thinking about Science (1988); The Beauty and the Beast (1997), Hallo Dolly (1998), Impact of Modern Genetics on Life Insurance (1999); An den Grenzen des Den-kens – a biography of Wolfgang Pauli (2000), Images & Imagination (2001), Die andere Bildung (2001), Das genetische Abenteuer – essays on genetics (2001), Das Genom – an introduction to modern genome research (2002); Am Anfang war die Doppelhelix - a biography of James D. Watson (2003), Die Bildung des Menschen (2005), Einstein für die Westentasche (2005)

Awards: Heinrich-Bechold-Medaille (1980), Preis der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft Freiburg (1981); Lorenz-Oken-Medaille (2002), Treviranus-Medaille (2003), Eduard-Rhein-Kulturpreis (2003), Preis der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft für Publizistik (2004), Satorius-Preis der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (2004)