American Joe Sanger, the first Humboldt Fellow to work at EMBL in 1979-80, remembers his first meeting with former EMBL Cell Biology and Biophysics group leader Brigitte Jockusch (1978-81), that resulted in a fantastic year at EMBL, and a lifetime of friendship and collaborations.

Together with his wife Jean Sanger, Joe met Brigitte Jockusch at a meeting sponsored by the DKFZ in Heidelberg. “I was one of the invited lecturers for the Symposium on Mitosis: Non-Tubulin Molecules in the Spindle. During a break between seminars, Jean and I talked with Brigitte, who had great evidence for actin in nuclei about the roles of actin in the mitotic spindle and in the cleavage furrow,” Joe recalls.

This conversation led to a sabbatical year at EMBL for Joe, who was then Associate Professor in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He was assigned an office and half laboratory by Sir John Kendrew to conduct experiments. He worked with Jean, as a visiting scientist, and in collaboration with Brigitte, which lead to further collaborations with Thomas Kreis, as well as a second visit to Heidelberg for Joe.

The collaborations with Brigitte resulted in five publications from 1980 to 1990, as well as a strong family friendship leading to visits and family exchanges.

Asked about his time at EMBL, Joe points out that the two most unusual facets to science at EMBL are the large proportion of funds being devoted to equipment development, and the very high quality of the technicians who work in the laboratories of their Principle Investigators.

 “I remember in particular the start of what became the first Leica Confocal Microscope. Sir John had organised a group of imagers, including me to a meeting to discuss the first steps toward the building of this microscope. My contribution was to state that anything that could limit the out of focus fluorescence would be a great boon to Cell Biologists working with fluorescently tagged proteins inside cells. “Back at Penn we did not have a similar financial way of supporting such equipment explorations. In fact, it is striking that the major light microscopic equipment still comes from outside the United States (Leica, Zeiss, Nikon, Olympus), and that EMBL continues to play a leadership role in the applications of light microscopy to living cells emitting fluorescent signals.”

Now Professor at the SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, USA, Joe recently won the highest award for scientific achievement from the American Association of Anatomists.