Hi data walker!

Welcome on board of my home page!

That's me:

• I was born in Dessau, a town in Sachsen-Anhalt which used to have a reputation as home of the fabulous "Bauhaus". Also the Junkers airplanes found their way from here to the skis of the 20's. Unfortunately, nothing's left worth visiting nowadays (except the Elbe river banks, the marvelous gardens of Wörlitz, the palais of Oranienbaum and the Bauhaus building itself, of course). Foreseeing the future of this remote industrial area my mother went to...
  
• Berlin - a much more lively city in the north of Germany. Due to the wisdom of several senior to very senior officials I focused my life on the eastern part of the city. To be exact not only of the city itself but of the world, apparently creating subconscious desires to the rising sun as you will see later on.
  
• Hagenow, the cozy town even further to the north homes a couple of red bricked houses, a church, a potato chips factory and a number of brave warrior I had the honor to join in their fearless but finally unsuccessful fight against westernisation. ;-) back
  
• Grown mature under the permanent presence of fresh northern air and potato chips I felt strong enough to go south and enrolled at the University of Jena hoping to benefit from the enlightening atmosphere of the German classic there. Surprisingly I didn't feel the desire to spent the night writing poems. In 200 years the atmosphere might have suffered from exhaustion by fresh scholars every year.

   Instead I learned everything from the bones of reptile skulls to mating behavior of shamrocks (not to forget the mating behavior of mammals). The social activities where significantly enriched by slight changes in the border crossing procedures between Hungary and Austria in '89. To be honest the whole life benefits greatly from this changes - everything rises: from salaries to unemployment, form the numbers of cars to the number of lawyers. Even I was offered a brand new Trabant after only 5 years booking time. I didn't take it.

• Now with all doors open and the help of ERASMUS I made it to the King's College in London. Thanks to the reluctant British college timetable and with a little help from a handy tape recorder I could eventually follow the lectures even with my poor second-language-highschool-English. I hardly miss a chance to praise the English way of teaching! Dear German lecturer - go to King's, listen to a lecture, sit down on a big stone, remember your stile and cry!
  
• The fact that I could stain a bacterial probe without staining the entire lab bench including everybody in immediate vicinity and my quite regular appearance on students meetings apparently gave rise to the hope that I might become a useful member of the society. The first society I was about to join was the right honorable Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, providing a variety of academic support incl. a monthly check on my pale bank account.
  
• Do you know anything about GroEL? About chaperones? Chaperones are a miracle. You can heat-kill an enzyme, mix it with a chaperone and it will be reborn to activity. The miraculous "double doughnut" GroEL was the topic of my diploma thesis at the Max-Delbrück-Center in Berlin.
  
• After 5 years pure academic environment I was curious about the world outside. At Hofmann-LaRoche in Basel I found somebody interested in chaperones, and the very best refractory I've ever came across in my life. We worked there with the hsp70 machine and I had a very exciting time learning a lot about the co-operation of the 3 different proteins.
  
• Following the call of my deep sub consciousness (see above) I turned my face to the sun and arrived 8920 km later at the RIKEN Institute in Tokyo. Most time I spent with gut contents - either after inorulation by termites or before inorulation by myself. The later result in indescribable enthusiasm for Japanese cuisine the first in a cladistic study about hsp70 of micro-organisms.

   If you want to learn more about Japan have a look at the excellent paper of Robert W. Ridge or give yourself a break with watching Ukioe.

• Well - the Ph.D.. It's something like a driving license or credit card (with the BTA "been to America" the credit card gold) for scientists. Don't even think about not to have one. The best "driving school" I could find was the IMB Jena. I'm working here on methylation pattern of human DNA. DNA is definitely methylated but hardly anybody knows exactly how and exactly why.

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Hobbies:

• Fortunately in most civilized countries homicide is a severely penalized mayor crime. This prevented me a long time from being killed from neighbors for my violin play.
  
• Thanks to the endless patience of my teacher I'm still able to study a bit the Japanese language and I spend a few hours every week doing Kyudo - the Japanese stile archery.
  
• In the remaining spare time I do a sort of MBA course for scientists at the Fernuniversität Hagen.
• Dancing to musik like this:

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