envelope of the letter to Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

There is a zebrafish facility in Tübingen/Germany [the town were I come from]. Once, it was in spring 2019, I went there and happened to meet a staff member. When I described my project to him and asked if it was possible to get access to the fish facility and spend some time there, he said that I should contact the boss Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. She is a developmental biologist and Nobel laureate.

How to contact a Nobel laureate? I tried an email in June 2019. This was unsuccessful. Since I didn’t have a lot of experience with the fish at that point, I thought I should know more about what the whole project is about before making any new efforts.

It took almost one year before I wrote her a letter. A letter for which I put a lot of effort, both in terms of content and design, and for which I even had a stamp printed. That was mid-March 2020 just before the lockdown. I will probably have to make a new attempt.