I had less time for scientific work. The institute, ill-equipped in general, was selleckchem proud to possess a Zeiss spectrophotometer. Kurt Santarius came from Würzburg. We cooperated. One of us took readings every 15 s, the other wrote them down. Results were published in decent international journals, no longer in German as before but now in English (e.g., Santarius and

Heber 1965; Heber and Santarius 1965). In the garden of the institute a lethal nuclear mutant of Vicia faba was found which was green as long as it survived. It proved incapable of photosynthesis (Heber and Gottschalk 1963). I was permitted to talk about this mutant at a photosynthesis meeting held in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. It was my first international conference. After my short presentation, a gentleman approached me saying that Otto Warburg, Nobel prize winner, had expressed the wish to see me. I went with

shaking knees. Warburg was very kind: ‘Very interesting data, never mind your interpretation, but very interesting’. I was proud. In Berkeley, I had learnt to handle 14CO2. Now I became responsible for the newly established isotope laboratory. This made me a social outcast for some, but increased the respect of others. Even 31P was added to the list of isotopes. I thought that feeding 14CO2 to illuminated leaves and looking for the kinetics of labelling inside selleck chemical and outside chloroplasts could give some information on the traffic of photosynthetic products inside leaf cells. The non-aqueous method of chloroplast isolation made this approach possible. Results of my somewhat messy isolation work convinced me that chloroplasts are sites of protein synthesis.

This, published Methisazone in ‘Nature’, remained my only contribution to this top international journal (Heber 1962). Other results were published with Johannes Willenbrink, a student of Professor Schumacher (Heber and Willenbrink 1964). After a lag-time, the paper caused an uproar. We had published what could not possibly be true. Everybody knew that photosynthesis makes and respiration consumes sugars. Metabolic pathways are opposite in direction. Now our obviously doubtful methods had led us to the untenable conclusion that intermediates such as phosphoglycerate or dihydroxyacetone phosphate, common to both photosynthesis and respiration, travel happily back and forth between chloroplasts and cytosol of intact cells. Moreover, sugars, products of photosynthesis, are not made in the chloroplasts. How could anyone in his right mind publish such nonsense? How could anyone believe it? At a meeting of the German Botanical Society at Munich, I was fiercely attacked by the widely known Professor Otto Kandler and suffered public defeat. I felt devastated.