Obituary for Prof. Kaspar H. Winterhalter
Prof. Kaspar H. Winterhalter served as a Full Professor of Biochemistry at ETH Zurich from 1977 to his retirement in December 2000. He was a researcher and teacher in the Laboratory of Biochemistry, which later became the Institute of Biochemistry. On 9th of October 2023, in his 89th year, this highly respected colleague passed away.
Kaspar Heinrich Winterhalter was born in Zurich on February 17, 1934. However, he spent the first years of his life in Davos, where he also attended primary school; a period that strongly influenced his character and his attitudes. He studied medicine at the Universities of Geneva, Rome, and Zurich, and obtained his M.D. degree from Zurich University in 1960. After several years in the USA and Canada as research fellow, resident, and post-doctoral fellow, he returned to Switzerland in 1965 and joined the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at ETH Zurich as a group leader. From 1970 he served as director of the Section of Molecular Biology at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory in Basel before being appointed Full Professor of Biochemistry at ETH Zurich in 1977. In 1980-83 he was Chair of the Laboratory of Biochemistry. Moreover, he enjoyed several longer sabbaticals including visits to The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla and Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kaspar Winterhalter was active in numerous societies and academies including the Swiss Hematological Society, The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche of Centro di Biologia Molecolare and the Accademia Dei Medici Romani (Italy), the USGEB (Union Schweizerischer Gesellschaften für Experimentelle Biologie), and The Senate of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. He was a member of the board of several Swiss and European funding agencies including CNR (Italy), EEC, Swiss Cancer League, and the Cancer League of Zurich. It is worth mentioning that as a skillful mountain climber in his younger years, Kaspar Winterhalter participated in 1958 as physician in the famous Swiss Dhaulagiri Himalayan expedition.
While wide-ranging, the scientific interests of Kaspar Winterhalter had a common ‘leitmotiv’: The molecular basis of human disease. In his early work, he studied abnormal hemoglobins and factors that influence hemoglobin stability in red blood cells. Later he focused on disorders in heme biosynthesis and structure-function relationships in heme proteins. He also studied components of the extracellular matrix. Given his broad interests, he and his coworkers collaborated with numerous research groups around the world with expertise ranging from clinical hematology to structural biology and biophysics. Altogether, he published over 200 journal articles.
His colleagues as well as his numerous staff and students remember him with respect and with great fondness for his kindness and accessibility as a teacher, scientist, and person.