Ewald Weibel: An organelle of his very own, and more

W eibel-Palade bodies are membrane bound , rod-shaped or-ganelles found exclusively in endothelial cells. These structures were utterly mysterious when Ewald Weibel, working in George Palade's laboratory, first described them in a seminal 1964 JCB paper (1). But it's now known that their distinctive shape is imbued by tightly wound strands of a protein called von Willebrand Factor, which is released from Weibel-Palade bodies to assist with blood clotting when endothelia are injured. By 1962, when he discovered the or-ganelles that would bear his name, Weibel had already perfected several new micros-copy techniques (2, 3) essential to understanding tissue and cellular organization and composition (4–6), which are still in use today. His later work continued to break new ground on how biological systems are organized to meet metabolic needs (7). Now retired for 18 years, Weibel graciously agreed to discuss with us the story of his life and career. What was it like growing up in Switzerland during World War II? We followed what was happening on the radio every day, but of course we were observing it from the outside because Switzerland was not involved in the war. There were shortages of almost everything, even in Switzerland. But I was only ten years old when the Second World War started, so I was really too young to fully understand what was happening. I was born and grew up in a small village near the town of Aarau. My mother was a seamstress and my father a typewriter mechanic, so I did not come from an academic background, but I went to the state college in Aarau, the same school Albert Einstein had attended 50 years before. The teachers there were very fond of challenging their students, and that was how I fi rst became interested in science and the investigative spirit. My classmates and I were very receptive to this kind of teaching , and, in fact, out of the 25 people in my class, seven went on to university careers and two were elected to the US National Academy of Sciences: myself and Werner Arber, who would win the Nobel Prize in 1978. Even after more than 60 years, we all still have a strong sense of camaraderie; every year in May we have a class meet-ing—those of us that still survive. You trained as an MD… Yes, because as a doctor I would be able to earn …