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“Feuersucher” by Gottfried Schatz
by Gottfried Schatz
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“We were all young arrivals to Basel from abroad, full of energy and optimism,” recalls Gottfried Schatz, one of the founding professors, recruited to the Biozentrum from Cornell University in 1974, in his book Feuersucher (fire seeker). A handful of excerpts vividly capture a bygone era.
Shortly before our return [to the US], the Basel-based Austrian molecular biologist Thomas Hohn invited me to give a lecture at Basel’s recently opened Biozentrum. I had already heard about this new institute through the grapevine, and read an admiring article in an English-language journal with the title “Basel for Big Biology.” So I boarded the train to Basel with high expectations – and I was not disappointed. [...] When it came to founding the Biozentrum, Basel simply bit the bullet, bucking its erstwhile reputation for frugality. [...] Initially, the “exorbitant” project did not sit so well with Basel’s city fathers, but once the decision had been made the purse strings were relaxed. In an astonishingly short time, an attractive building had sprung up in the heart of the city, featuring a broad and welcoming staircase on which researchers would cross paths and chat. Even more importantly, the microbiologists Eduard Kellenberger and Werner Arber, recruited from Geneva, along with the visionary research director of Roche, Alfred Pletscher, made sure that their baby started out in life with flat hierarchies, generous employment conditions and renowned professors from all over the world. I had a feeling that a new and trailblazing chapter was beginning for European research [...]. After we had returned to the US, my future colleague in Basel Max M. Burger called me late one evening in my windowless Cornell office and asked: “Mr. Schatz, would you like to join the Biozentrum?” I dispensed with the customary academic courtship rituals, and said “Yes” on the spot [...].
There is nothing more wonderful than being part of the founding generation of a new research institute. We were all young arrivals to Basel from abroad, full of energy and optimism. We roamed the picturesque countryside around Basel on group excursions with our
families, barbecued the traditional “Klöpfer” sausages and played football. And while we too occasionally bumped heads over organizational issues, we never knew the petty jealousies and personal intrigues that universities are so famous for. [...]
The Biozentrum and its motley crew elicited their fair share of disapproving frowns all round from the city’s venerable university. Excessively casual attire, unprofessorial behavior, a lack of respect for the traditions of our faculty, inadequate knowledge of German, unnecessary trips abroad and general “American vices” were just a few of the transgressions we were accused of. Even our nocturnal work habits were met with umbrage: As an anonymous neighbor delicately put it in his letter of complaint, “the nighttime light from the Biozentrum interfered with his marriage.” As many of us spoke only broken German or none at all, we became conspicuous for our absences from faculty meetings, earning a reputation – not always undeserved – as arrogant and uncooperative. Moreover, many in Basel struggled to accept that we regarded living beings as chemical and physical units. Even the term “molecular biology” was, for many of them, a barbaric profanation of life. “A molecular biologist will never be able to explain the wondrous shape of a rose,” a prominent Basel biology professor once prophesied before we came along – and was fortunately no longer around to see our colleague Walter J. Gehring decipher the role of genes in the formation of the eye. Later, when we were among those spearheading the triumph of modern gene technology, there were even some faculty colleagues who regarded the Biozentrum as a symbol of contempt for nature and scientific megalomania. I fear that not a great deal has changed, even though gene technology has not recorded a single noteworthy accident in its almost 50-year history, and is today one of our most effective weapons against virus pandemics and countless other biological threats.
Schatz, Gottfried: Feuersucher, 1st edition, published by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 2011.
