Pioneer Member

Debby Delmer – Anton was a very complicated person. One day he could drive you crazy by editing your new manuscript so intensively you could no longer find your own text! The next day he would offer me, as a young Assistant Professor, such wise advice of the kind you never forget. I think the best thing Anton did for me (and for all of us at the PRL) was giving us all his marching orders as Director: “Ve shall ALL drink coffee together at 10 AM!! Every day!” And I never failed to go except when just impossible. It taught me to see how valuable it was to take a few minutes each day to talk to my amazingly smart colleagues who knew such different things from me. And don’t be obsessive, slow down for just a short time each day and enjoy life a bit more. The coffee wasn’t great, but the ideas that came from those encounters were.

Pamela Green – I once mentioned to Anton in the hallway of the MSU-DOE Plant Research Lab that some of the S-like ribonucleases of Arabidopsis might be induced in flower petals during senescence. Unfortunately, it would take several hours per sample to collect enough senescing petals to test that. Anton was not impressed by that excuse, and as I recall, he said “hum” and walked away. I told my first graduate student, Crispin Taylor, that I thought we needed to do that experiment. The work showed that RNS2 was a senescence-associated RNase and it diverged from the S-RNases before speciation. The research was published in PNAS (Taylor et al., PNAS 90:5118-5122, 1993) and was communicated by Anton Lang. Even though I have recently retired, I am very grateful to have had the benefit of Anton’s influence, especially during the early phase of my professional career.

Russell Jones – Anton Lang had an immense impact on my career, and he was perhaps single-handedly responsible for my becoming a US citizen and for my career at Berkeley. I first met Anton at the 10th International Botanical Congress in Edinburgh in 1964. Anton was at the Congress with several of his new and younger colleagues including Hans Kende and they told me about the new Plant Research Laboratory (PRL) at Michigan State University. They convinced me to join them as a post doc when my PhD was completed in 1965. I eagerly accepted the invitation and sailed for North America with my family–my wife Frances and two kids– in September, 1965. Soon after accepting the offer of a post doc at the PRL one of Anton’s first pieces of excellent advice was that when applying for a visa for the US, I should apply for a Green Card as he averred that Europeans who came to the US as post docs were very inclined to stay, so of course I applied for and was granted permission to enter the US as an immigrant and I’ve never looked back! I was among the first cohort of post docs at the PRL, and Anton was my adviser, a relationship that was very rewarding in all aspects. Anton was an excellent mentor, and, as everyone who knew him knew, his advice was direct, well thought-out and often forceful. I was a beneficiary of his excellent counsel. Anton along with his wife Lydia made the PRL a very welcoming place as they hosted frequent gatherings and parties at their home giving young post docs easy introductions to many of the leading figures in plant physiology in the US. As you can imagine, the PRL exuded an aura of newness and excitement, and it attracted a stream of visitors to the Michigan State campus. We were a very tight knit and friendly community at the PRL from the lab’s inception in large part because of the Langs. The initial group of researchers at the PRL in those early days were housed in the biochemistry department as the new PRL building was under construction and we would not occupy it until early 1966. They were heady days where we younger researchers were inspired by Anton and a group of very talented faculty that included Joe Varner, Hans Kende, Phil Filner, and Jan Zeevaart among others. In January 1966, Anton told me about an open position the area of plant physiology in the. Botany Department at UC Berkeley. He spoke highly of the campus and the department, but he cautioned me that my predecessor in that position had not been granted tenure under circumstances that were puzzling to many, and he advised me to be cautious. I accepted the position of Assistant Professor in the Botany Department, was promoted to full Professor in 1974, and after more than 40 wonderful years retired in 2009. causing me to still wonder about the fate of my very talented and successful predecessor!