News

Walter Hoppe (March 21, 1917 – November 3, 1986)
Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin

Geng (Gary) Ren approached me recently asking for a picture of Walter Hoppe, my Ph.D. mentor at the Max Planck Institute in Munich 1968-1970. The reason was that I had a few conversations with Gary some years ago about the early development of electron tomography, which Hoppe even applied to the imaging of one single molecule of fatty acid or of the ribosome. To my surprise I found nothing in my scattered picture archive. Going to the internet — which didn’t exist at the time Hoppe died, in 1986 — I found his face in one single group picture, which was part of his student’s, Robert Huber’s, recollections. Here is a blowup, blurry but recognizable. Subsequently, through Gary’s persistence, he located the picture (above, in 1979) posing next to the electron microscope, which he otherwise never touched.

Hoppe had thick glasses that dominated his face. I still see him, standing up in the discussion of a lecture, not with a question but with a comment — invariably referring to a footnote in an article he had published years before. I find it plausible that his habit was a major reason why the use of footnotes has been barred in most of today’s scientific journals.

Hoppe was an early visionary conceiving of electron microscopy as an extension of x-ray crystallography he was trained in, and phrasing approaches to reconstruction in the framework of this field. The first scientific meetings that I attended as a graduate student were on Protein Crystallography in the Alps, jointly organized by Max Perutz and Walter Hoppe.