Wittgenstein Award Laureate

Wittgenstein Award Laureate 2001 Univ. Prof. Dr. Heribert Hirt

Department of Plant Molecular Biology, Vienna University

Heribert Hirt Curriculum Vitae

Heribert Hirt Homepage

heribert.hirt@univie.ac.at

Plant Genomics and Beyond Conference 2009

”A Banksie fruit. The plant occurs only in Australia and the first time I saw it I was fascinated. The capsules open only after an extensive fire. This unique life-cycle proved to me that evolution has plenty of surprises up its sleeve.”

TOMATOES FOR THE TUNDRA OR THE ART OF ADAPTATION

Heribert Hirt spent his first five years in Kashan, a small town 200km south of Tehran. There followed schooling in Germany, study in South Africa, a scientific career in England, Holland and Austria. In other words, an ideal school in which to learn about adapting to changing circumstances. ”You recognize that things function not only like this but also completely differently.” And so it is no surprise that the Wittgenstein prizewinner has elected to study the greatest adapters in the living world – plants.

As a young microbiologist in the lab of Sir Paul Nurse, who went on to win the Nobel Prize, Hirt began by studying yeast but he soon encountered the ideal organism for his studies in the form of Arabidopsis, a small weed with tiny flowers found on the edges of paths throughout the world. Because of its high number of seeds, Arabidopsis is easy to propagate and in addition it has a number of ”genetic titbits”.

As a boy, Hirt wanted to be a detective and he showed many of the necessary traits in his lengthy research to decipher the genetic signals that cause plant cells to divide. Together with his team in the Vienna Biocentre’s Max F. Perutz Laboratory he has managed to identify the first of the control molecules responsible. In 2001 his achievement was recognized by the award of the ”Austrian Nobel Prize”.

Hirt’s hobbies provide a well-rounded picture: travelling, hiking, crosswords, old scripts and cryptography. ”There are fascinating parallels to the DNA code, where the most complicated instructions imaginable are written with only four letters.” After a holiday on Crete he was determined to decode the writing on the Disc of Phaistos – ”unfortunately without success,” as he concedes with a grin.

While he is travelling, Heri Hirt – as ”thousands of friends on all continents” call him – observes how ingeniously plants can adapt to a wide range of environmental conditions. ”They can’t escape so they have to learn to cope with widely differing temperatures and to defend themselves against predators. Furthermore, they are able to harvest primary energy from sunlight. Based on what they can do, plants are vastly superior to animals, even to man. Our position at the peak of creation is highly questionable.”

Especially as, with climate change, the peak of creation is currently engaged in ”the biggest experiment of all time.” The adaptability of plants will become even more interesting as a result. A vision for the future: ”to equip the fruits and vegetables that we so like eating but that are sensitive to cold with the resistance to frost of northern plants.” In accordance with this, Heri Hirt is now researching the genetic processes by which plants communicate with their surroundings. ”How do the sensors work that tell a plant that the environmental conditions are changing and how are these trans-lated into physiological adaptation?”

The answers have revealed that ”learned” adaptive mechanisms of this kind are controlled by the proteins in the DNA ”packaging” and, incredibly, are inherited. ”In Arabidopsis we have already found the molecular switch that enables the plant to waive its inborn acclimatization to cold and to resist frost without any transition.” A step with important implications for the future and that would not have been possible without the Wittgenstein Prize. ”Without the Prize we would not have been able to follow this line of research. The ideas simply seemed too risky and the project application we had submitted was rejected!”