Memories of Annemarie Weber.

Annemarie Weber was born on 9/11/ 1923 in Tubingen, West Germany and grew up in Konigsberg (the German enclave), where her father, the well-known muscle physiologist Hans H. Weber, had a position at the University. Starting in school she displayed the independent will power and keen intellect that characterized her whole life and made her highly dominant in the muscle field. She excelled in the subjects of interest. She was a teenager during World War II, a very difficult period during which she was often separated from her family without news. She was in a youth work camp, where she suffered from vitamin deficiency due the restricted diet and saw the beginning of the Russian invasion. She was from a very gifted family. Her brother Jurgen Weber (1928–2007) was a well-known sculptor, author among others of two panels at the Kennedy center in Washington. She was very close to her nephew, Carl Costantin Weber, also a successful sculptor in the Faculty of Architecture at the Academy Anhalt in Dessau; her niece Saskia; and her niece Doina Weber, a successful movie and TV actress currently in Vienna Austria; and to their children, whom she invited to share her summer home in Woods Hole (Fig. 1A). She loved her house in Woods Hole, where she lived a good part of the summer and enjoyed long walks, swims (including the famous long swim across the harbor propelled by tidal current that had been pioneered by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi) and watching the birds attracted to her feeder. Figure 1 Annemarie Weber as a great-aunt taught and entertained the children, while advising the parents (A with some of her German family during a party for her birthday; B with two Armstrong grand children). C) Her friends enjoyed a lobster dinner in her house ... Annemarie loved exploring the world. She took wonderful trips in the desert with her long time friends Richard J Podolsky, and Vivianne Nachmias and later took me on treks to the White Mountains in New Hampshire and through a wonderful exploration of Crete and the Minoan civilization. Through her life she retained her love of intellectual pursuit and a keen interest in people and places that she shared with her friends. Her extensive library included works on exploration, evolution, and the function of the brain. She introduced me to Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, Shackleton expedition, and numerous essays on evolution. She was also a close observer of human nature and loved watching children grow and display their personalities. She was an aunt and great-aunt to young and older children in her immediate German family (Fig. 1A) in addition to innumerable others in the families of friends (Fig. 1B). Her lobster dinners at the house in Woods Hole (Fig. 1C) were the summer highlight for friends, particularly Andrew and Ursula Szent-Gyorgyi, with whom she maintained a life-long friendship. She was an enthusiastic gardener and was very proud of having the most vivid flowerbed in her neighborhood (Fig. 1 D). She died in Philadelphia from lung cancer on 7/5/2012. Hans Weber advised his daughter to pursue a medical career so she took an MD at the University of Tubingen in 1950. However, the research spark had already been activated by discussions with her father and so she never practiced medicine although she maintained a keen interest in disease. With funding from the Rockefeller foundation she had several postdoctoral training experiences, notably with A.V. Hill at University College London (Fig. 2A) and at Harvard University. She also had a formal training period with her father in Heidelberg which probably influenced her most strongly. H. H. Weber had been very much interested in ATP and in the role that the high-energy compound had on muscle contraction. In the course of his in vitro studies he developed the philosophical concept that “that if one wants to understand the mechanism of contraction one must understand relaxation” (HH Weber, 1959). It is thus not surprising that both his two most successful trainees, Wilhelm H. Hasselbach and Annemarie Weber, focused on the role of sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) in relaxation. Her academic career started after she migrated to the United States. She was Research Associate (1954–59) and Lecturer (1959–62) at Columbia University; Associate member, MDA Institute for Muscle Disease, New York (1963–65); Professor of Biochemistry, Washington University in St. Louis (1965–72); Professor and later Professor Emerita of Biochemistry, University of Pennsylvania (1972–2012) Figure 2 A) A.V. Hill and Annemarie on he roof of University College London in 1951, photograph by D. R. Wilkie (1985). B) An animated discussion between Annemarie and Hugh E. Huxley (seated) at a Conference. Andrew F. Huxley is caught in the image. With the recent ... Annemarie was a very intense scientist. In her own work and in that of her trainees and collaborators she expected total attention to details. In her own words, “if you do not remember what you were doing a day ago, you were not paying enough attention”. In her published figures the data follow very precisely the predicted curves. The same precision was expected of others: speakers at scientific meetings had to cross the mine fields of her “look here, sweetie” comments, with which she pointed out the weak points. Collaboration with her involved a strong expectation of corresponding precision. Her interactions at local seminars, Gordon conferences and Cold Spring Harbor Symposia were fully engaged, with intense discussions (Fig. 2B). Annemarie’s distinguished research career earned several honors, She became a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (1975) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976). She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1978) and of the Biophysical Society (2000). Her research career can be divided into three distinct stages, each resulting in key publications, of the type that turn a page in history.