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Science in School Issue 15 : Summer 2010 I t seemed a given that the young Helke Hillebrand would go into science. “I fell in love with biology in ninth grade,” says the woman who oversees about 200 PhD students at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), all of whom trust her as an advisor, listener, problem-solver and friend. “I very much appreciated in science that there was no end to asking ‘Why?’ and ‘How does it work?’ – and how astonishing our whole world is if one comes to think of it as a constantly evolving system rather than something ‘given’.” From there, it was a short hop into plant biology, which also offered something else that Helke, who grew Sowing the seeds of science: Helke Hillebrand