Karl Maramorosch: I Put On the Major's Army Coat and Hat and We Escaped Across the Border

Abstract

Karl Maramorosch was born 15 January 1915 in Vienna, Austria. He is a winner of the prestigious Wolf Prize in Agriculture and is a Holocaust survivor. He is known internationally for his research on viruses, insect vectors, and plant pathogens, and is a pioneer in insect cell culture. Maramorosch attended primary and secondary schools in Kolomyja, Poland (now Ukraine), and mastered both the accordion and piano. As a young boy, Karl was inspired to study virology after his older brother returned home from medical school and described the research of Professor Rudolf Weigl on lice-borne typhus. In 1938, he graduated from Warsaw University of Life Sciences with an Agricultural Engineer degree and returned to the family farm in southern Poland. The following year, Karl and his wife, Irene, were interned in Polish refugee camps in Romania, where they remained during World War II for four years. Following the liberation of Romania by General Malinowsky's Soviet army, he began graduate studies in plant pathology at Bucharest Polytechnic University. The U.S. agricultural attache to Romania recognized Maramorosch's skills as an agriculturalist and offered him the chance to escape from Romania to Sweden. Seizing the opportunity to leave war-torn Europe, he did not finish his degree. Karl Maramorosch, Rockefeller University, 1952. Karl and Irene immigrated to the United States in 1947. Shortly thereafter, he obtained employment at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City. Here, his scientific career began to flourish under the mentorship of Dr. Lindsay M. Black, who challenged Maramorosch to finish his graduate studies and helped him obtain a pre-doctoral fellowship through the American Cancer Society. The fellowship paid $200 per month, …