阿克塞爾‧梅耶(Axel Meyer), born in 1960, studied in Marburg, Kiel, Miami, Berkley and Harvard and is an internationally renowned genome scientist. He is a professor of zoology at the University of Konstanz, and his career includes periods as a visiting professor in Berkley, Stanford and Ottawa and as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He has received numerous awards and prizes and is a member of several academies. He is a regular contributor to several newspapers. His success in bringing science across to the general public was honoured with the award of the European EMBO prize for Communication in the Life Science.