With deep sadness I inform the community that Prof Dr Wolfram Saenger - an exceptional scientist, an inspiring mentor, and for many of us, a true scientific father whose influence will continue across generations, passed away this week.
Wolfram Saenger was a pioneer of modern structural biology in Germany and Europe. Over a career spanning a few decades, he helped shape how we understand the architecture of life at atomic resolution - from nucleic acids to large cellular machineries such as Photosystems I and II. His scientific journey included stays at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Freie Universität Berlin, where he led the Crystallography group until his retirement in 2011. I had the privilege of doing my PhD under Wolfram’s supervision, working on photosystem II. It was both challenging and exciting: he expected all his PhD students to do the best job possible. In his group, the goal was never merely to “get a structure.” The goal was to understand what it can answer. Those who met Wolfram will remember his exceptional knowledge - on many different topics. He wanted to know why things were the way they were, and he pushed us to chase that “why” with the best tools available. I always admired his vision - long before XFEL became a thing - he dreamt about using it to study Photosystem II mechanism to visualise the working of the oxygen evolving complex. His vision was also matched by a high standard of scientific rigor that shaped everyone around him. Wolfram set the bar high - sometimes uncomfortably high - but in retrospect it really made us work not only harder but better and maintain the high-quality of our work. I also vividly remember Wolfram’s impatience - he used to call us at midnight during synchrotron data collection, asking about the resolution we got from the next batch of crystals. But he wasn’t calling us to micromanage or control; he was genuinely interested in the outcome! I also remember when I was helping him to clean up his office he showed tons of precision X-ray photographs he had used in the past - and it seemed like he remembered all his experiments. Many of you may also remember his book 'Principles of Nucleic Acid Structure'. It was one of the first structural biology related books which I had read (and at the time of reading I couldn't even imagine that one day I will do my PhD with its author!) - which really made me want to dive deep into structural biology. I hope many Wolfram's PhDs will share this opinion, but he really was our scientific father. Wolfram did not merely supervise projects; he built us as scientists. He was quite often demanding, sometimes relentless, often inspiring, but that is all necessary to progress in our investigations. On a personal level, I remain forever indebted and grateful to Wolfram for the opportunity he gave me - to work on a challenging and exciting topic with great collaborators, such as Prof Athina Zouni and Dr Jan Kern, under his brilliant supervision and in one of the best cities in the world. We mourn Wolfram, but we also celebrate him: his excellent knowledge, his inborn curiosity, his great vision for structural biology. His standards continue to guide us and his impatient spirit will remind us to ask nature to reveal yet a little more of its secrets through the structures. Thank you, Wolfram. Albert Guskov (Dr rer nat, MBA) | Associate Professor | Head of Biomolecular X-ray Crystallography unit | University of Groningen Nijenborgh 7, Groningen 9747 AG, The Netherlands Tel: +31631921946 | Secretary: +31 50 363-2400 | E-mail: [email protected] <[email protected]>| ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/
