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My Story:  Gottfried Schatz

  From Gottfried’s memoirs:   By the time I was sixteen 1 had become deeply frustrated and wanted to get away.  I applied to go to the USA as an exchange student and was lucky: thanks to the American Field Service I could spend the school year of 1952 in Rochester , New York .

   That year in the USA affected me as profoundly as my childhood years.  In the early fifties the Soviet Union was no more than a weak foil to the USA that savored its new role as the unchallenged ruler of the world.  Every day was a new adventure.  I valued the freedom I had at school, even though I was amazed at the low academic standards.  Our German teacher was a lovely, warm woman, but I never figured out which language she was trying to teach us.  It surely was not German.  Music was a different matter, though.  Rochester was home to the first-rate Eastman School of Music and I was incredibly lucky to receive a scholarship to study violin there.  It was pure paradise.  I also took private lessons on the basics of jitterbug and spent evenings with church groups discussing deep questions of life such as “Should one kiss a date on the first night out?”  The answer was no, of course, but as I was much too shy to date, the kissing issue was moot.  Most of the other things we were told not to do I had never heard of, but they sounded delicious and I tried to remember them for later.  I was still the diffident European looking in from the outside, but at least I now had another vantage point from which to triangulate the world.  Suddenly I could see it in three dimensions.  I worked as a newspaper boy for the “Rochester Democrat & Chronicle”, as an usher at a local movie theater, and as a helper at Sears, Roebuck & Co during the Christmas shopping season.  After Christmas, all helpers were “laid off”, but I had no idea what that meant and came back to work the next day.  My boss explained to me that I was “fired”, that I should “quit” coming back; I did not understand that either, but eventually I got the message.  My US existence was not always easy, but I loved it.  And I did not even know how helpful this sojourn would be for my future as a biochemist.

   Returning to Austria felt like being plunked back into a dark hole.  My new stereoscopic vision mercilessly revealed Graz as the backward and prejudiced town that it then was, and I  finished my last year in high school as a difficult and rebellious student.  But the Eastman School and the artists I had heard there had taught me what violin playing can be and I channeled much of my pent-up energy into becoming a better player.  I was shocked by the  low general standard of Austrian violin playing even though I did not know the reasons.  I  learned only later how effectively the Nazi purges had crippled Austrian and German violin  playing for which Jewish violinists had set the standards for the past century.  As records were  essentially non-existent, Graz with its imposing cultural institutions was not even aware of its  intellectual and artistic indigence.  It had sunk into provinciality.

   From the Web site of the Swiss Science and Technology Council, of which Gottfried is President:  Gottfried Schatz was born on August 18, 1936 in a little Austrian village.  He grew up in Graz , but spent the year 1952 as an American Field Service-sponsored high school student in Rochester , NY . After receiving his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Graz in 1961, he joined the Biochemistry Department of the University of Vienna where he began his studies on the  biogenesis of mitochondria and discovered mitochondrial DNA.  From 1964 to 1966 he worked as  a postdoctoral fellow with Efraim Racker at the Public Health Research Institute of the City of  New York on the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation.  After a brief interlude back in Vienna , he emigrated to the USA in 1968 to join the staff of the Biochemistry Department at Cornell University in Ithaca , NY .  Six years later, he moved to the newly created Biozentrum of the  University of Basel where he and his group elucidated the mechanism of protein transport into  mitochondria. Schatz is a member of many scientific academies, including the National Academy  of Sciences of the USA , the Royal Swedish Society, and the Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and has been awarded the Louis Jeantet Prize, the Marcel Benoist Prize, the Gairdner Award, the Krebs Medal, the Warburg Medal, the E. B. Wilson Medal, and many other honors.  He has served  as Secretary General of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), as Councillor of The Protein Society, and as Chairman of many Advisory Boards.  Currently he is President of the  Science Council of the Institut Curie ( Paris ), Scientific Councillor of the Institut Pasteur ( Paris ), and President of the Swiss Science and Technology Council.  He and his Danish wife have three children.

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