In Memoriam

Friedrich Bonhoeffer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, passed away on January 29, 2021 in Tübingen, Germany; he was a renowned scientist whose pioneering research revealed how axons find their targets during development, recognized by the 2020 Gruber Prize for Neuroscience (jointly with Corey Goodman and Marc Tessier-Lavigne). Bonhoeffer came to spend a sabbatical with Gordon Lark in 1972 at the newly-formed Department of Biology and made seminal contributions towards establishing Molecular Biology at Utah. Earlier in his career, he had an enormous impact in the field of DNA replication, by isolating the first temperature-sensitive mutants in DNA replication; one of these stopped DNA replication immediately (the gene was later shown to encode the DNA polymerase present at the replication fork). The DNA replication mutants that Bonhoeffer isolated were essential to defining the replication complex. He remained closely associated with molecular biologists at Utah in the 1970s (including the Lark, Wechsler, Olivera and Greenlee laboratories). After Bonhoeffer switched his research focus to neurodevelopment, several graduate students and faculty members from Utah trained in his laboratory, including the late Chi-bin Chien and Rolf Karlstrom, a Biology PhD student with Mike Bastiani, who became Chair of the Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.