Professor Franz Theuring, PhD, studied electronics and biology at the Universities of Brauschweig and Goettingen, Germany. He gained his PhD in 1986 in the Institute of Human Genetics, University of Goettingen, and was post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Professor Theuring was responsible for the establishment and introduction of transgenic technologies both in the MPI, and then from 1988 in the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology of Schering AG, Berlin, in areas of pharmacological research for drug target validation and disease model development.