Biography
Biography: Heiko Bleher
Abstract
In 1822, when the Briton Francis Hamilton first described a certain small, longitudinally-banded fish as Cyprinus rerio(today Danio rerio), from the Kosi River in India and assigned it a so-calledDanio-division (named after the Bengalese nameDhani), he can have had no idea of the popularity this little cyprinid would eventually achieve. It was first imported for the aquarium hobby in 1905, and christened “zebra danio“, the name it still bears today. In universities and research laboratories it was established in the early 1980s, as “Zebra Fish”, and became a model organism for studies of vertebrate development, developmental biology, and some human genetic diseases, after Streisinger’s pioneer work at the University of Oregon, with wild fishes collected by Bleher in Assam. With the result that15 years before Dolly the Scottish sheep achieved fame, Zebra Fish had been cloned at this University, being the first vertebrate cloned in history. Today over 5,000 researchers in 450 labs throughout 30plus countries study Zebra Fish. And in this oral presentation Bleher will not onlytalk about recent successes with this 3-5cm long fish, but also about other tiny fish species with amazing scientific underestimated results inseeking solutions to diseases which affect humans …