Michael Schmid (1948-2018): A Life Devoted to Science

karyotypes. After receiving his PhD degree in Human Biology, he joined the group of Wolfgang Engel in Göttingen, a human genetics laboratory dedicated to studying physiology and pathology of human spermatogenesis. It was the good fortune of the newly founded Department of Human Genetics at the University of Würzburg School of Medicine that we were able to recruit Michael Schmid, in 1981, as head of the future lab of Experimental, Comparative, and Clinical Cytogenetics. What prompted Michael to give up his productive work in Göttingen and move to Würzburg? He probably sensed that he would be A native of Aschaffenburg, Germany, Michael Schmid received his primary and secondary education in Caracas, Venezuela. Having to witness the social and economic downfall of his beloved Venezuela during recent years almost broke his heart. Early on, Michael became fascinated by and attracted to the abundant flora and fauna of the Caribbean paradise. As a high school student, he started observing, collecting, and describing butterflies leading to the publication of his first book [Schmid and Endicott, 1968]. So it was no surprise that Michael became a student of biology, first at Harvard, then at Basel and Freiburg. Under the guidance of Winfried Krone and Ulrich Wolf, he started his cytogenetics career by studying the nucleolus organizing chromosomes of the human karyotype. His thesis work resulted in his first Nature paper [Schmid and Krone, 1975], reporting the discovery of an acrosomal chromocenter in the spermatogenesis of Amphibia – by good chance a model organism in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Ulm where he had moved. Forty years ago, Michael published the first of a by now legendary series of 37 papers entitled “Chromosome Banding in Amphibia” [Schmid, 1978]. These papers have become a sort of trademark for the perfection (if not art) by which he characterized and classified amphibian Accepted: September 28, 2018 Published online: October 17, 2018