A dogged hunter of life on the edge has won microbiology's highest honor. On 24 November, Karl Stetter, a expert on extremophiles at the University of Regensburg in Germany received the Leeuwenhoek Medal from the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences. The award is given once a decade in honor of the microscope pioneer Antoni van Leeuwenhoek.
Stetter is the world's most successful cultivator of hyperthermophiles, the organisms that grow fastest at temperatures "where others are boiled to death within seconds," he explains cheerfully. He and his colleagues have identified more than 45 new species of archaea, many of which would catch a chill in scalding 80°C water.
Stetter made one of his most dramatic discoveries on a family vacation. In 1980, he and his colleagues discovered microbes growing above 80°C in Icelandic hot springs. "That's when I caught fire," he says. "I thought, 'My god, there could be others. Could there be life above the normal boiling temperature of water?'" Doubting that the German government would fund such a far-fetched idea, he and his wife Heidi, also a microbiologist, planned a family vacation the next summer to Vulcano, an island off the coast of Sicily. There, while Heidi and their 6-year-old daughter Sabine waited in an inflatable raft filled with sampling equipment, Stetter dived to volcanic vents to retrieve super-heated water samples that ranged from 105 to 110°C. Heidi helped fill the bottles, while Sabine took pH readings, he says. Back in the lab, the samples turned out to be teeming with hyperthermophiles. Stetter and his colleagues eventually identified 11 new species from the vents.
Stetter, 62, is nearing Germany's mandatory retirement age for professors, so next year he will move his lab to Diversa, a San Diego-based biotech company he co-founded. "As a scientist you cannot simply turn off the key and put the car in the garage," he says. "I'm still excited. There is more work I still want to do."
Related sites
Stetter's site
Leeuwenhoek
medal
The Dutch
Royal Academy of Sciences
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