In memoriam: Oluf L. Gamborg, 1924–2007

Abstract

Oluf was born on a farm in Denmark and attended school there. His teenage years were influenced by the Second World War and the occupation by the German military forces. It was during that period that he got the inspiration to move to North America, which he did in 1949. He had attended a horticultural college in Denmark, but after arriving in Chauvin, Alberta, the home of a distant cousin, he entered the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1952 where he obtained a B.Sc. in Agriculture with distinction in 1956 and a M.Sc. in Plant Biochemistry in 1958. He then worked at the Prairie Regional Laboratory (PRL) of the National Research Council of Canada in Saskatoon. The job also allowed him to study, and he registered as a Ph.D. student at the University of Saskatchewan in Fall 1958. He worked on the synthesis of phenolic compounds in plants. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1962 and continued to work at PRL. Oluf began working with plant cell suspension cultures in the 1960s and made some seminal findings relating to the nutritional requirements for such cultures. During his career, he energetically worked to establish plant tissue culture as a viable and essential agricultural tool in many parts of the developing world, particularly Asia. Through his travels and his training activities, the technology spread rapidly. As a result, tissue culture techniques—such as micropropagation of elite genotypes and in vitro germplasm storage—now play a key role in the agricultural selfsufficiency of many countries. Indeed, one paper outlined a medium now referred to as Gamborg’s B5 medium, which is still one of the most widely used media for plant tissue and cell cultures at present. In the early 1970s, he began working on protoplasts and discovered inter alia, the value of polyethleneglycol as an aid to protoplast fusion. This method is still widely used. His work in the 1960s and 1970s made the Prairie Regional Lab, Saskatoon (now Plant Biotechnology Institute) of the National Research Council of Canada a highly recognized center worldwide for in vitro technology. The second phase of his career took Oluf to the USA where he was a Senior Scientist/Research Director/Scientific Consultant for different biotechnology companies in California between 1979 and 1985 and where he exploited in vitro technology for applied purposes. He then moved on to Colorado State University (1985–1991) where he was Associate Director and Research Coordinator of the “Plant Tissue Culture for Crops” project of the US Aid for International Development Agency. This involved various areas of in vitro research for salt tolerance and also included organizing training courses, networking, and consultancies in several developing countries. Some of this research resulted in publications, but more importantly, it led to the establishment of tissue culture-based research activities in several of these countries. From 1991 to 1998, he was a full time consultant to private companies and had major projects in Indonesia and Viet Nam. Oluf also played a role in the personal development of numerous scientists with whom he interacted in the early phases of their careers. My first working relationship with him was as a member of the Tissue Culture Association Committee that he chaired on “Chemically Defined Media” in 1972, which also included Toshio Murashige and Indra Vasil. The report “Plant Tissue Culture Media” was published in In Vitro in 1976 and is still widely quoted. The International Association for Plant Tissue Culture was headquartered in Canada in 1974–1978, mainly because of In Vitro Cell.Dev.Biol.—Plant (2007) 43:281–282 DOI 10.1007/s11627-007-9070-5