OBITUARIES

Erwin Latzko

Professor Erwin Latzko passed away on November 6, 2010, in Kranzberg, Germany.

Latzko was born on April 20, 1924, in Glaserhau, Czechoslovakia (now Sklené, Slovakia), a small village founded by German settlers in the Middle Ages. He attended primary and secondary school in Slovakia. At the end of World War II, he worked for two years as a farm laborer in Germany and then entered the Technical University of Munich at Weihenstephan to study agriculture, graduating with a PhD in plant nutrition in 1952.

After spending time in laboratories at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich and at the Institute of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Marburg, he worked for four years at the Potassium Industry Agricultural Research Station in Hannover. He then returned to Weihenstephan, completed his habilitation in 1962 (with a thesis that analyzed the effect of monovalent cations on phosphorylation reactions and the redox status of yeast), and was appointed to the faculty of the Institute of Agricultural Chemistry at the Technical University. In 1965, he came to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he spent two years with Martin Gibbs and began working in the area of photosynthetic carbon metabolism. In 1968, he was promoted to full professor, and in 1969, he became head of the Department of Chemical Plant Physiology in Weihenstephan. He assumed the directorships of the Botanical Institute and the Botanical Garden at the University of Münster in 1977, where he served until he retired in 1989.

Latzko’s research centered on, but was not limited to, fructose bisphosphatase, the enzyme at the intersection of the Calvin cycle and starch formation in the chloroplast, and other enzymes that utilize or produce fructose bisphosphate or fructose 6-phosphate. He was a skillful, fatherly teacher and supervisor of his students, and he was involved in many productive collaborations both with the Gibbs group and with other laboratories around the world. Among his many publications are a much-cited review with Grahame Kelly and Martin Gibbs in the Annual Review of Plant Physiology in 1976 and biennial reviews of photosynthetic carbon metabolism with Grahame Kelly that appeared from 1974 until 2004 in the series Progress in Botany. He served as editor of Volume 6 of the Encyclopedia of Plant Physiology, New Series with Martin Gibbs and, from 1980 to 1984, as a monitoring editor for Plant Physiology. In 1991, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bayreuth in recognition of his contributions to our understanding of the biochemistry of photosynthetic CO2 fixation.

Latzko was one of a group of hikers at a Gordon Conference in New Hampshire in 1982 who came up with the idea of organizing a post–Brussels Photosynthesis Congress satellite meeting for the following year. That post-Congress meeting was the first Wallenfels meeting. When the Congress in Brussels ended, 30 plant scientists traveled by bus to Wallenfels, Bavaria, where the University of Bayreuth has a small center for scientific meetings. During the long bus ride and during the following three days, the world revolved around the enzymes of photosynthetic carbon metabolism, discussion of the modulation of the activity of those enzymes, hearty Bavarian food and drink, and a terrifying raft trip on a tiny stream that passed under very low bridges. Fortunately, no one was decapitated. The meeting was so fruitful that it has been held every year since (not always with rafting), and Latzko attended until 2003.

Erwin was a good friend and colleague. He was outgoing, collegial, and generous. He enjoyed travel and showing visitors around Weihenstephan and Bavaria. He was a gracious host and a gracious guest. Grahame Kelly especially recalls Erwin’s admirable philosophy: “The most important thing in life is to be nice to people!”

Latzko was buried in Kranzberg. He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Sylvia; three children, Gabriele, a physician in Berlin, Stefan, a violinist with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and Reinhard, a cellist and professor of music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna; and five grandchildren (with two more expected shortly).

Louise E. Anderson
University of Illinois at Chicago
Erwin Beck
University of Bayreuth