Karl Maramorosch

Karl Maramorosch (January 16, 1915 – May 9, 2016) was an Austrian-born American virologist, entomologist, and plant pathologist. A centenarian and polyglot, he conducted research on viruses, mycoplasmas, rickettsiae, and other micro-organisms; and their transmission to plants through insect vectors in many parts of the world. He is the co-author of a textbook on techniques in virology and is the author of numerous papers on the biology and ecology of plant viruses, their hosts, and vectors. He received the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 1980 for his contribution to the study of crop pathogens. Life

Maramorosch was born in Vienna, where his family had escaped to from Soroki during the war. His Polish father was a graduate of the Vienna Agricultural University. His mother was from Croatia and she was a gifted pianist who could speak German, Italian, French, Serbo-Croat and English. Along with his siblings he spoke to his father in Polish and in German with his mother. He grew up in Kolomyja, Poland (now Ukraine) where he attended primary and secondary schools (Gimnazjum Kazimierza Jagiellonczyka) and from age of seven took piano lessons for twelve years, graduating from the Moniuszko Conservatory in Stanislawow (Ivano-Frankivsk) in 1934. He received his Agricultural Engineer degree from the Warsaw Agricultural University (SGGW) in 1938. At age thirteen he became inspired to become a research virologist, hearing about the work of Professor Rudolf Weigl in Lwow (Lviv) from his older brother, who was Weigl’s student at the Medical School. Weigl worked on Rickettsia prowazekii and by inoculating lice and maintaining them on volunteers, he had developed a vaccine against tick typhus.

In 1939, after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Maramorosch and his Warsaw-born wife Irene (née Ludwinowska) fled to Romania, where both were interned in Polish refugee camps for the following four years. After the liberation of Romania by the Soviet army Maramorosch continued his graduate studies at the Bucharest Polytechnic, choosing plant pathology as his major. In 1947 Karl and Irene emigrated to the United States, where Irene became a librarian in the New York Public Library, where she worked for the following 30 years. In 1949 Karl obtained his doctoral degree (Ph.D.) at Columbia University. The same year their daughter, Lydia Ann, was born in New York.