Herbert Steinbeisser: a life with the Xenopus embryo.

Ketsch, Heidelberg and Ecuador Herbert was born in Ketsch, a small village near the Rhine river where he grew up fishing for pike with his grandfather. He did his Ph.D. at the nearby University of Heidelberg with Michael Trendelenburg studying the transcription of protein coding genes in Xenopus oocytes (Steinbeisser et al., 1989). After graduating he won an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral fellowship to work with Eugenia del Pino at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Quito, Ecuador. There, in 1990, he worked with the giant oocytes of the marsupial frog Gastrotheca, which carries fertilized eggs on its back (del Pino et al., 1986). Herbert loved Ecuador and maintained a long-standing exchange of students.