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Gisela Mosig

German biologist

  • 2 min read
  • 4 chapters

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Early years

While growing up on a farm in Saxony, Mosig became interested in biology and physics. After World War II, the region where she lived became part of East Germany and evolutionary teaching in her high school skewed toward Lysenkoism. Finding the intellectual atmosphere intolerable, she fled to the west on her bicycle with only the belongings she could carry. After undergraduate studies at the University of Bonn, she earned her doctoral degree in plant genetics at the University of Cologne in 1959.

From there, she was recruited to Vanderbilt University to study bacteriophage T4, a topic for which she became a leading investigator. After postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt and then the Carnegie Institute of Washington at Cold Spring Harbor (with Nobel laureate A. D. Hershey), she returned to Vanderbilt as a faculty member in 1965, and became a citizen of the United States of America in 1968. Mosig served on the Vanderbilt faculty until her death in 2003.

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