Alfred Pühler has been a powerhouse in German microbiological research—initially in the area of plant-microbe interactions and later in industrial microbiology—over the past four decades. But he actually started out in nuclear physics, obtaining his first degree in that discipline from the University of Erlangen (now the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) in his native Bavaria in 1967. Around the same time, however, his attention was pulled in a completely different direction. "I watched two television programs dealing with the discovery of the genetic code," he recalls. The informational aspects of biology implicit in that work intrigued the young physicist.
Without ever studying biology, he embarked on a PhD in microbiology at the Institute of Microbiology at Erlangen where he became one of the early pioneers of molecular biology in Germany. "I'm quite sure we were one of the first labs in Germany to do genetic engineering," he says. ...
