 Who is your microbiology hero and why? Of any scientist either dead or live, known or unknown to you, who would you like to give a shout out to now? Now it's always hard, this isn't it, but for me it would have to be Rita Colwell, absolute fabulous scientist and such an inspiration for many of us, has shaped the understanding of cholera so that now we can predict and have prevention strategies in many different locations in the world. Still a conference I was at a few weeks ago was giving five different talks despite the career stage and life stage that she is now in. Oh, well here's a one. One of my microbiology heroes would be Dr Gardner, the reason is that he was the microbiologist who cultured the microbes that were first used, the very first experiments on penicillin. Penicillin was the start of the whole farmer industry, penicillin has changed literally how long millions of people live, but also because his son and he used to live in my village at home, so that's a lovely local connection as well, it's a real guy in the village, well known and loved locally, but he had that huge impact as the bacteriologist involved in those first experiments with mice. It's hard to choose one, but the one that comes to mind is Agnes Ollman who just recently passed and Philippe Sampsonetti wrote a wonderful obituary that was on the film's website. I knew Agnes from the Fage meeting days and I never knew about her escape from the eastern block in the 50s through a harrowing experience in which she was, you know, escaped in a camper driven by Jacques Manot and that story was in a book that I read that compared Albert Camus and Jacques Manot and then I emailed her after this and I said, Agnes is this you? And she said, and most people don't know about this part of my life, but it was so interesting to relate this to who she had become and I think, you know, what a harrowing and fascinating story. I would say that I have a lot of microbiological heroes and I constantly meet them at the conferences so I met both of my bosses at the conferences. My boss that I, that did my research in PhD, I met her at FEMS and I also, 2017 or 2015? 2011. 2011, all the way back then, okay, wow. So and the other, my boss, I met him not in FEMS, but in microbiology conference of Belgium Society for Microbiology, which is also part of FEMS. So they are both my heroes, but if I would have to go historically, I would say that would be probably 11 hook because of his inventions and his spirit of looking at microbes and even engineering the methods and the tools to look at the microbes. But we have these kind of modern day engineers as well. If you look at the microscopy field, I would say Tamignon who led the session here at FEMS about microscopy. I'm much involved in structural biology. I would have to mention a lot of people that did structural biology starting from people that resolved ribosome and finishing with people that do structural biology in my field. So many heroes. Many heroes. There's a whole, there's as many microbiological heroes almost as microbes themselves, although not quite because there are far, far more microbes out there than people. At one level, Louis Pasteur, because he was the first person that really began to think about what microbes do. Before him, of course, Anton Livenhoek, who first saw bacteria in the microscope. You know, in my lifetime, there have been enormous number of people that have influenced me and, you know, some of the pioneers of gene regulation, Jacob, Mono, Beckwith have always been stimulating. And someone would I like to mention is when I was in Edinburgh as a PhD student, Willie Donoughy, he made me not that well known, was a very deep and intellectual microbiologist who we used to laugh at then because he didn't come to the lab very often, but he was so deep thinking. And now looking back, he had, he made the most important seminal contributions to understand when E. coli divides, how it divides and how this is controlled. So at the time, we used to joke at him because he used to appear about half past 11 in the morning in the lab and we usually gone by too, but it wasn't he wasn't thinking or working. He was just, you know, his lifestyle on the subject. Yeah. Okay. I would say Louis Pasteur, when I started reading about him in my undergraduate class, I saw his very fundamental, his fundamental approaches, which helped answer a lot of questions. His role in pasteurization as a method, his understanding of fermentation, being notable and reputable chemist is very important. And I think, yeah, for that reason, I like Louis Pasteur. I think Louis Pasteur is a fantastic choice. In fact, I recently got to visit the Institute Pasteur in Paris and we got to see his tomb, which is underneath the institution. There is his like marbled tomb and it's like this kind of cross between science and religion and it has angels and then descriptions of his research and it's one of the craziest places. And he's resting is right there underneath the institution. That's lovely. It will be something lovely to see. Okay. Let me tell one name is Professor Jeff Ellington is now working in Newcastle. And actually he is one of the healers who is working with the Bacillus for a long time. And actually he is quite a well, good scientist, a good person and also with a humor and people love him a lot. Probably the first one is Michel Wagner, because that is the first great microbiologist that I have dealt with during my master, he is basically so I've never worked with him directly. I was host in his group, his great group. And then the second but not the less important is Bednath Schink, which is a German microbiologist and he's a, in particular, he's a biochemist, which gave great contribution to the understanding of biochemical cycle in microorganisms. He retired last year or two years ago, I think so he's not working anymore. And I think he was one of the greatest microbiologists I've ever met. There were a number of influences. My first powerful one was my post-doc mentor, Bruce Ames. I was a grad student in Illinois, I heard him give a seminar and I was at that point getting conversant with nucleic acid chemistry in a bit with nucleic acid biochemistry. But I could see, I thought when I heard him talk I said he knows how to think like a cell. And I was drawn to him not only because of the science he'd done, but I wanted to sort of learn if I could somehow grasp how to think physiologically and not just learn genetics. And then when I came to MIT, I was very powerful. There were a number of excellent microbiologists from Boris MagaSanic who worked on nitrogen metabolism, Salvador Luria, my colleague and Nobel Prize winner, founder of our Cancer Center and Maury Fox who was very, very thoughtful about DNA repair and David Botstein who was a huge influence on me, he was a bundle of enthusiasm about all things genetic. So I think those in particular and then other along the way other that I could keep going for probably an hour but the people influenced me so there's never one single person because I sort of drifted into it and from a different kind of chemical training and then I still to this day have people that I get excited by and I learn things from. Well I'm glad there's many at least. There are many, I'm sure. If I had to pick one, it's Edward Jenner for the reasons that first of all he was a doctor, he was an MDE, he was trained by John Hunter, one of the pioneers in modern medicine, he was an entomologist, he was an ornithologist, he was a botanist, he was kind of a renaissance man and I think he had this capacity of observation which allowed him to see this issue of vaccine and the entire discovery of vaccination by Jenner was based on this observation of these pistules on the hands of these persons and I like him for this because to me he was a doctor, he was a man of enormous knowledge and he was someone observing and making decisions on the basis of his observation so if I had one to single out it's Jenner. Now having said this I have a passion for the last part of the 19th century and my heroes of course are you know Plaster, Mechnikov, Fleming, it's like a group these are giants again but if I put some sort of emotional dimension to it I go back to Jenner all the time. My hero, well maybe my first microbiology professor who kind of got me hooked into the whole bacterial world who was just like sitting there giving us lecture and talking about what my probes can do and I was like oh my god this is amazing. So who was that lecturer? Professor Michael Hecker from Greifswald from Germany. What was his speciality? What was the part of microbiology he looked at? Physiology, how can bacteria adapt to certain environments? Okay, it's a nice thread of consistency here through all of your answers. Lovely. Okay I'm gonna have to go with Fleming, you know he did fine penicillin and I really love how it was found by accident and it's kind of how all the best things are discovered. So yeah it's gonna be Fleming because he revolutionized healthcare. My biological hero is Sydney Brenner for the reason that he was free-mind, incredibly imaginative, participated in several key discoveries of classic biology and last but not least and a great sense of humor. Yeah okay which is always good.