In memoriam Dirk Pette
On 4 June 2022, Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dirk Pette, former professor of biochemistry in the Department of Biology of our university passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. He had an eventful and fulfilled life.
Dirk Pette was born in Hamburg on 14 February 1933, the third of four children of his parents Edith and Heinrich Pette. During the Second World War, his mother lived with the children in Upper Bavaria, while his father worked as a neurologist in Hamburg. After the end of the war, mother and children moved back to Hamburg. After completing secondary education, Dirk Pette studied human medicine in Hamburg and Geneva. In 1956, he married Fanny Megalidou, a Greek student. The couple had two children. In the same year, Dirk Pette received his doctorate in medicine. He completed his habilitation (postdoctoral qualification) in physiological chemistry at the University of Marburg in 1963.
After a period as a Privatdozent (lecturer) at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Dirk Pette was appointed as professor of metabolic and muscle biochemistry and enzymology in the Department of Biology at the recently founded University of Konstanz in 1967. The following decades were extraordinarily prolific for Dirk Pette in research and teaching. He built a dynamic and highly motivated team of academic and technical staff, doctoral researchers and students, and numerous scientific guests from Europe and overseas. With this team and his network of internationally collaborating research groups, Dirk Pette succeeded, among other things, in discovering fundamental mechanisms of the plasticity of muscle fibres in relation to their control by nerve fibres, and gained a very high international scientific reputation. This in turn provided an important basis for acquiring two successive DFG Collaborative Research Centres (from 1973 to 1998) as their spokesperson. In this way, Dirk Pette established scientific "excellence" within his discipline in Konstanz and made it widely visible long before the nationwide "Excellence competition" began.
Dirk Pette has received numerous scientific honours, including the J.B. Wolffe Honorary Lecture of the American College of Sports Medicine (1984), the "Dirk Pette Symposium" of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, Copenhagen, Denmark (1999), an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (2000), and the Duchenne-Erb prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Muskelkrankheiten (2005).
Dirk Pette did not focus solely on research, but was also strongly committed to teaching. In line with the motto from the founding period of the university, "Teaching from Research", he, like many of his colleagues, was concerned to reduce the overly theoretical nature of traditional studies and instead to bring students more into the laboratory and involve them in concrete research practice. In the Department of Biology, this has been implemented through the system of "advanced courses," which have proven their worth since the university's founding and have therefore remained essential components of the curriculum. Even after his retirement, Dirk Pette continued to be present in teaching, as it took a long time to fill his position.
Dirk Pette's personality was characterized by sharp analytical thinking and an enormous knowledge – in his field, of course, but also far beyond. He was a highly educated man. Furthermore, he was – one may respectfully say so – downright a "workhorse" and placed the highest demands on everything he did. Of course, he had his own views and opinions, which he defended vigorously and, if necessary, with great perseverance. He was extremely articulate, in German, English and French. He liked to talk, and what he said – almost always in free speech – was clearly structured, made sense and was fit to print. However, his most important characteristics were his human warmth, his openness towards others, his politeness and respect. This could be perceived, for example, in his high esteem for the craftsmen in the Scientific Engineering Services of the university, with whom he had a lot to do regarding the construction of special equipment for his laboratory and whom he met on an equal footing. He was also exemplary in his extraordinary willingness to help and support a number of scientists who had fled from the Warsaw Pact countries by quickly and unbureaucratically integrating them into his research team. With his charm and humour, which were so characteristic of him, he quickly won the hearts of "complete strangers".
In his retirement of about twenty years, he enjoyed his numerous hobbies, with relatively good physical fitness and complete mental clarity, together with his beloved wife Fanny (deceased 2017) and in the company of friends; first and foremost making music on his violin and viola at regular chamber music evenings in the Pette house and also at performances in front of an audience.
Dirk Pette was one of the outstanding personalities of the Department of Biology. We have lost an internationally highly respected scientist and pioneering university teacher who was extremely popular and appreciated by his colleagues, his staff and his students. The Department of Biology will always remember him with gratitude.