Diter von Wettstein (Dietrich Holger Wettstein Ritter von Westersheim): September 20, 1929-April 13, 2017

Photosynth Res DOI 10.1007/s11120-017-0420-9 TRIBUTE Diter von Wettstein (Dietrich Holger Wettstein Ritter von Westersheim): September 20, 1929-April 13, 2017 J. Kenneth Hoober1 Accepted: 30 June 2017 © The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication Prelude North of Copenhagen, outside of the small town of Hillerød, is Fredericksborg Castle, a seventeenth century, extraordinary building that houses the Danish Museum of National History. In the third floor attic, above the architectural glitter and portraits of the famous historical figures in Denmark, is a photo gallery of the more contemporary politicians, artists and entertainers. Photographs of only two scientists were in this gallery when I visited in 1987: Niels Bohr, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, and Diter von Wettstein, which illustrates the stature that Diter enjoyed in Denmark (see Fig. 1 for a portrait; a selection of several photographs are in the Supplementary Material by Govindjee). Family background Diter was born on September 20, 1929, in Göttingen, Germany, into an elite academic family. His grandfather This tribute to Diter von Wettstein was invited and edited by Govindjee, Editor of the History and Biography Section of Photosynthesis Research. Charles Arntzen (Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA) and Christoph Benning (Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA), read this Tribute and enthusiastically approved its publication. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11120-017-0420-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * J. Kenneth Hoober 1 Susavion Biosciences, Inc., Tempe, AZ 85281, USA Fig. 1  A portrait of Diter von Wettstein. Provided by Penny von Wettstein—Knowles (Richard von Wettstein Ritter von Westersheim) became Professor of Botany in Prague, The Czech Republic, and was Director of the Botanical Garden there. His grandmother (Adele) was an artist and studied painting with Gustav Klimt. His father (Friedrich “Fritz” Wettstein Ritter von Westersheim) conducted research in genetics in Berlin with Carl Correns at his Institute, and carried out his seminal work on the genetics, polyploidy, cytoplasmic inheritance and developmental physiology of mosses. Diter’s mother (Else Therese Jesser von Wettstein) studied botany with his grandfather in Vienna, Austria, during World War I and then went for 2 years to Uppsala in Sweden to study algae. In 1924, his father became Professor of Botany and 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Photosynth Res Genetics at the University of Göttingen, as well as Director of the Botanical Garden. In 1931 his father moved to the University of Munich, as Professor of Botany, and in 1934 accepted the position previously held by Professor Carl Correns at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (now Max Planck Institute) for Biology in Berlin, Germany. Early research and training Diter’s early career was under the tutelage of scientific giants of the early twentieth century, with mentors such as Albert Frey-Wyssling, Jakob Seiler, Åke Gustafsson, Erwin Bünning and co-workers, such as Arne Tiselius. With Gustafsson, Diter began his work on mutagenesis of barley and the genetics of chlorophyll synthesis. With Tiselius, he developed skill in electron microscopy, with which he obtained the earliest micrographs of developing chloroplasts (von Wettstein 1959a, b). In 1953 Diter received two doctoral degrees, one from the University of Tübingen (Germany) for research in Biology/Biochemistry and a second from the University of Stockholm (Sweden) in Genetics. He also received a DSc degree in 1957 from the University of Stockholm in Genetics. From 1957 to 1962 he was Associate Professor in Genetics at Stockholm. In 1958 Diter obtained a Rockefeller fellowship to carry out research and training in the USA, first with Frits Went at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, for 3 months, then in the summer at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, to learn phage and bacterial genetics, and finally to do research in the last part of the year at the Carnegie Institute of Washington at Stanford University with James H.C. Smith and C. Stacy French on chlorophyll (bio)synthesis in barley mutants. Teaching and research in Sweden, Denmark and US Upon his return to the University of Stockholm, Diter developed the first phage and bacterial genetics course in Sweden modeled after the Cold Spring Harbor courses, for which he could only find moral support and a teaching laboratory at the Microbiology Institute of the Karolinska Institute (the Medical faculty of Stockholm University). Many years later, Lars Rutberg, Professor of Microbiology in Lund, commented to Diter that he had taken that first course at the Karolinska Institute and that “…most present day professors in molecular biology in Sweden took your course”. In 1962 Diter became Professor of Genetics and Head of the Institute of Genetics at the University of 13 Copenhagen, Denmark. He had a long-standing interest in the process of chromosome pairing, on which he worked with Mogens Westergaard and described it as a “fascination” (von Wettstein 2006). In 1972 he was invited to join the Carlsberg Laboratory as Head of the Department of Physiology, a position he held until retirement in 1996. His negotiations for the position at the Carlsberg Laboratory resulted in construction of an excellent building for research and a major expansion in staff under his guidance. He was also the Head of the Carlsberg Plant Breeding group. During this time (1966), he was also a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Davis, CA, USA, collaborating with the prominent plant lipid biochemist Paul Stumpf on the biosynthesis of chloroplast lipids in his barley mutants (Appelqvist et al. 1968a, b), and also at Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA. After his “official” retirement in 1996, he continued at Washington State University as the R. A. Nilan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, School of Molecular Biosciences and the Center for Integrated Biotechnology. During his years in Sweden and Denmark, Diter collected close to 360 mutant strains of barley that had deficiencies in pigment biosynthesis. These mutations were characterized genetically to more than 105 loci, a major contribution that he made to the Nordic Gene Bank and the Carlsberg Laboratory (Simpson and von Wettstein 1992). The mutants were organized according to pigment phenotype into several groups: xantha, albina, viridis, tigrina, zonata, and chlorina. Diter was a pioneer in applying integrated genetic, biochemical and microscopic analyses of these mutants. Analysis of the specific chlorophyll precursor that accumulated in these mutants allowed many of them to be placed on the biosynthetic pathway (von Wettstein et al. 1974, 1995). Diter’s electron microscopic examination showed a number of mutants to be defective in th (...truncated)