Lindau Nobel Laureate Portrait

Edmond H. Fischer in Discussion With Marc Pachter, Director Emeritus, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Category: Other Highlights

Date: 5 March 2020

Duration: 76 min

Quality: HD

Lindau Nobel Laureate Portrait (2020) - Edmond H. Fischer in Discussion With Marc Pachter, Director Emeritus, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Comment

In anticipation of the 100th birthday of Edmond H. Fischer on 6 April 2020, the Lindau Nobel Laureate meetings visited our dear Lindau friend Eddy Fischer and talked with him about his life, science and the beauty of it as well as the Lindau Meetings.
Eddy Fischer attended eleven meetings from 1993 - 2015. Impressions of his various stays in Lindau can be found here.

We are hoping to welcome back our esteemed friend at this years meeting, where he is invited to give the "Life Lecture" which would for sure be enlightening and inspiring for the young scientist as well as for his fellow Nobel Laureates.



Abstract

In 2019, Nobel Laureate Edmond Fischer talked with Marc Pachter about his childhood, his career and the beauty of science.
Highlights of the interview:

10:40 Childhood dream of finding a cure for TBC
12:15 Young Eddy Fischer and childhood friend convert an attic into a makeshift laboratory
22:35 Eddy Fischer and his friend are offered a summer internship for medical students: ““For us it was paradise, to such an extent that we couldn’t see the black clouds on the horizon””
26:19 Edmond Fischer enrolled in the University of Geneva in 1939 “I was in Switzerland in World War II. We felt guilty that we couldn’t fight a war that had to be fought.”
29:40 “The music story is a funny one” Edmond Fischer on being a pianist and the Geneva Conservatory of Music
38:22 PhD thesis with Kurt Meyer and work on alpha-amelyase
44:07 “I went by accident” Edmond Fischer wants to go to the US to work in biochemistry
48:37 Fischer arrives in the US at the begin of McCarthyism: Though he might have to leave, because the US "is going the way Germany or Italy under Mussolini went”.
52:00 Relationship with Ed Krebs and the development of their Nobel Prize-awarded project on phosphorylation
58:15 Edmond Fischer on the the beauty of science: “You always know where you start from, you never know where you end up.”
1:07:40 Edmond Fischer on his love for the Lindau Meetings and what excites him
1:14:00 Edmond Fischer on his first invitation to the Lindau Meetings – and a plane encounter with George Wald