Erich Walther Six (1926-2014) In Memoriam

Erich Six was born in 1926 in Frankfurt, Germany. He studied at the University there, obtaining a Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1954. His research concerned indirect effects of radiation. As a research fellow of the German Research Council, he studied radiation effects on the green alga Acetabularia. In 1956 he came to the Biology Division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he learned bacteriophage lore and joined G. and L.E. Bertani working on the genetics of phage P2. His first paper on P2 was in Volume 2 of Virology (PMID: 13593178). He was back in Germany, at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen for most of 1958, but returned to the United States the following year, to the Department of Biology at the University of Rochester, as an associate of A.M. Campbell. Soon after, he was offered a faculty position in the Microbiology Department at the University of Iowa Medical School, where he remained, giving courses in microbial genetics, until his retirement in 1996. As Professor Emeritus, he continued to conduct experiments and to communicate actively with colleagues. His last paper was published in Virology in 2001 (PMID: 11312661).