On Thursday, June 22, 2017, Prof. Klaus Willecke invited colleagues and friends to a private farewell lecture to the university club. He thus ended a long period of scientific activity in Köln, Essen and Bonn, with stops in Stanford (USA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and Munich, and finally a senior professorship at the LIMES Institute of the University of Bonn.

In his farewell lecture, Prof. Willecke drew a picture of his personal and professional development to this day, illustrated with photo memories.

Born in 1940 in Berlin and growing up in Helmstedt (East-Lower-Saxony), he found his way to chemistry in his father’s pharmacy. Fascinated by this subject, he studied chemistry in Kiel and Munich. He completed his diploma and his doctoral thesis in the lab of the Nobel Prize laureate Feodor Lynen (enzyme biochemistry) at the MPI for cell chemistry in Munich. As a postdoc, he continued to develop his expertise in the following years in the labs of A.B. Pardee, Princeton University (USA), and F.H. Ruddle, Yale University (USA), and habilitated in genetics in 1973 at the University of Cologne. Again and again, he faced new challenges and topics as a professor in Cologne, Essen and Bonn and during his stays abroad in the United States.

Since 1986, he has been a member of the University of Bonn. After intensive negotiations on the re-equipment of the institute for the purpose of genetic cell biology research with transgenic mice, by means of fundamental reconstruction of a floor of the former biology didactics rooms in the Römerstraße, he accepted his appointment as new director of the Institute of Genetics. As of 2009, he continued his work as a Senior Professor at the LIMES Institute. Looking back at his private and professional life, he especially thanked his wife Eva-Maria and his long-term colleagues Dr. Gisela Wolff and Brita Wilhelm for their valuable support.

And how could he find the energy to continue his scientific activity for such a long time? He himself answered the question with a quotation from Mark Twain: "Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

Prof. Michael Hoch, Rector of the University of Bonn and Prof. Willecke's long-time colleague, thanked him for the trustworthy collaboration, as did Prof. Waldemar Kolanus, Managing Director of the LIMES Institute, and Prof. Walter Witke, Chairman of the Department of Biology, wishing him at the same time all the best for his retirement. From now on, he will be able to devote himself more intensively to his hobbies, beekeeping, the flora and fauna in his home garden, and playing the violin as duo.