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I was recently invited by Michael Roehrl to present a talk at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute, here on the East Side of Manhattan. Michael, a physician and researcher at this Institute, is the son of a student I knew from my time in the late 60s at Walter Hoppe’s group, which combined X-ray crystallography with electron microscopy.

As a special present Michael gave me pictures of the site of the Hirschegg meetings – early meetings co-organized by Walter Hoppe and Max Perutz in the Austrian Alps. The pictures were sent to him recently by Wolfgang Steigemann, another student I knew from that time. And with the pictures came a tabulation of participants of all four Hirschegg meetings. All this material is excerpted from a book published in 2006 by Dick Dickerson.

I was at one of the four Hirschegg meetings – the one in 1968 — that brought together PIs and students from the two disciplines – you could say these were the precursors of the more recent hybrid meetings organized at the Lake Tahoe site. The talks were in the morning. Afternoons were free for downhill skiing, and evenings often became animated apres-ski with discussions over beer and wine.

Below is a picture of the hotel where the meetings took place, with Wolfgang Steigemann in front on the right. Also there is a rare picture showing Hoppe with Perutz.

Proceedings of the meeting that I was at, in 1968, were published in a special issue of the quaintly titled journal “Berichte der Bunsengesellschaft fuer Physikalische Chemie.” Recognizable for an English-speaking scientist is the name “Bunsen” of the Bunsen burner.