In many ways, Kellenberger's career was typical of the now-vanishing generation that founded European molecular biology. He studied physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich under Paul Scherrer, the most prominent atomic physicist in Switzerland. In 1945, he joined the laboratory of Jean Weigle at the University of Geneva to work on developing a Swiss-made industrial electron microscope. To illustrate the usefulness of such an instrument for biomedical research, Kellenberger attempted to provide micrographs for the sales catalogue. At that time, however, preparation methods were so crude that biological samples were either destroyed by the electron beam or so distorted as to be meaningless. Focusing on bacteria and phages, Kellenberger eventually succeeded in 1958, together with the chemist Antoinette Ryter, in developing the ‘RK-method’, which went on to become a standard protocol, and their paper a citation classic.
The scientific priorities of the atomic age brought many young men and women into physics, but they also pushed some physicists out of the discipline. Weigle, for example, who did not wish to work in the large teams of ‘big science’, left for the California Institute of Technology in 1948, where he became a phage geneticist, a close collaborator of Max Delbrück, the spiritual father of the rapidly growing Phage Group. By returning every year to his former laboratory, then led by Kellenberger, Weigle created a crucial transatlantic bridge, making the Geneva group part of a handful of European researchers working on phage genetics.
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