When it came to finding a new Director of EMBO in 2010, the members of Council were determined to appoint an active researcher. Few can compete with the level of activity of Maria Leptin, a professor at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Genetics. As well as running research teams in both development and immunology,…
Hermann Bujard, who led EMBO as Director from 2007-2010, also shares the credit for EMBO coming to Heidelberg in 1973. His experience of working in American laboratories in the 1960s gave him a lifelong determination to provide a better environment for fast-moving subjects such as molecular biology in Germany’s hierarchical university departments. Bujard had switched…
The EMBO Journal was started in 1982 when John Tooze was Executive Secretary of EMBO. In the foreword of the very first issue, Tooze and Klaus Weber, then Secretary General of EMBO, quote Francis Crick who wrote a few years earlier that “molecular biology can be defined as anything that interests molecular biologists.” At the…
Born in Galway in the west of Ireland, EMBO’s third Executive Secretary Frank Gannon has built a career out of seeing possibilities where others might not see them, for himself and for the organisations he has worked for.‘I’m pretty international,’ he says. ‘I did my PhD in Leicester. After that I went to Madison Wisconsin,…
Almost as soon as recombinant research began to take off in the United States, one of the leading scientists in the field, Paul Berg of the University of Stanford, wrote a letter to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States calling for a moratorium on certain types of recombinant research until guidelines had…
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory was the idea of prominent scientists such as the American physicist and molecular biologist Leo Szilárd and Nobel Prize winners James D. Watson and John C. Kendrew. Their goal was to create a CERN-like supranational research centre to redress the balance in the strongly US-dominated field of molecular biology. The…
John Tooze has called the EMBO secretariat under his leadership (from 1973 – 1994) a ‘string and sealing wax operation.’ And to any of his successors it must be a mystery how he ran EMBO, including founding and editing The EMBO Journal and supporting Lennart Phillipson at EMBL, with only the support of his two…
While the funding from the Volkswagen Foundation and other initial funders enabled EMBO to recruit a secretariat, elect members, provide the first fellowships, and run courses and workshops, it would ultimately need a more permanent funding source. That meant obtaining support from national governments, on the model that funded CERN and other international laboratories. EMBO…
As with many foundations financing scientific research, physicists held key positions at the Volkswagen Foundation. Its funding department was headed by Rudolf Kerscher, a physicist by training and a friend of Leo Szilard. Kerscher visited Szilard in the USA in the summer of 1962, even before he launched the idea of EMBO in December 1962…
EMBO began as an idea enthusiastically endorsed by leading scientists from across Europe, but with no funding and no central administration. By offering to run it as a part-time job, Raymond Appleyard enabled it to become established while senior figures in the organization set about obtaining the intergovernmental agreement that would secure its long-term future.…
