Scattering techniques in biology—Marking the contributions to the field from Peter Laggner on the occasion of his 68th birthday

This special issue of the European Biophysics Journal marks the contributions of Peter Laggner to molecular biophysics and X-ray and neutron scattering techniques on the occasion of his 68th birthday. Actually, Peter Laggner is not a person who likes to dwell in the past, or talk of the good old days. ‘‘Why look back, if one can look forward?’’, is one of his most popular quotes. Well, we hope that he will forgive us on this one occasion. So, let us look back and recall some of the past from a rich life with many things to remember, but, to make it bearable, we will use an element of humor. Born in Piberbach, Upper Austria, Peter went to Graz to study chemistry and physics. During his PhD, he started with his so successful combination of small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), which he learned from the Austrian pioneer in SAXS, Otto Krakty, and biophysics, taught to him by Anton Holasek, then head of the Medical Biochemistry Institute, University of Graz. For his thesis on ‘‘Structure of Antigen Antibody Complexes in Solution by SAXS’’ Peter had an urgent need for blood. Therefore, this part of his career truly was bloody. Using his own car he would go to the slaughterhouse to fetch swine blood in buckets and then drive back to his laboratory. Occasionally blood spilled over. Who cares? In the laboratory the tedious job of precipitation and centrifugation awaited him, accompanied by anxious moments when the rotor lifted and the centrifuge started to move around. By dawn his eyes were blood-shot, but the proteins were prepared and ‘‘real science’’ could start. Soon afterwards lipoproteins—high-density (HDL) and low-density lipoproteins (LDL)—caught Peter’s scientific interest. Again, blood had to be isolated, and trouble started from the beginning. This time the blood had to be of human origin. Thus, healthy normolipidemic volunteers were required. By chance, PhD students were ‘‘lucky’’ to act as donors for Peter’s blood pool, but the most fascinating thing was, however, to use one’s own blood, as he always told us. Later, lipoprotein subspecies came in from John Chapman in Paris, making life much easier. However, whenever whole blood was harvested in our laboratory, Peter was among the first to put his name on the list of donors, eager to support our common efforts to solve the structure of LDL. One day, early in the morning, Peter arrived at the laboratory with a bottle of warm blood in his hands and laughed, ‘‘Hey girls, I have been at the doctor and thought I could bring you some fresh blood!’’, remembers Ruth Prassl. Peter’s pioneering work on lipoproteins has significantly shaped our current understanding of lipoprotein structure and dynamics. In addition to his research focus on LDL, Peter devoted a large part of his endeavor towards understanding complex biological membranes. Early on, he considered the membrane as a dynamic entity with spatial and temporal fluctuations in its local composition. So, he initiated structural studies on lipid polymorphism and domain formation, long before the term ‘‘membrane rafts’’ became popular. A particularly important study concerns the demonstration of chain interdigitated bilayers in ether-chain lipid membranes. He also pioneered lipid interactions with membrane-active peptides, showing that melittin from bee venom acts on membrane collective properties at concentrations as low as 1/1,000 (peptide/lipid molar ratio). G. Pabst (&) R. Prassl H. Amenitsch M. Rappolt K. Lohner Institute of Biophysics and Nanosystems Research, 8042 Graz, Austria e-mail: georg.pabst@oeaw.ac.at