Featured Biography: Øjvind Winge

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                 Featured Biography: Øjvind Winge

Early Life

The Danish geneticist and mycologist Øjvind Winge was born in Aarhus, the capital of the

Jutland peninsula, on May 19th, 1886. His father, Sigfrid Victor Winge, was a lawyer, and his mother, born Agno Rian, was from Trondhjem in Norway. His Christian name, Øjvind, is a Norwegian rather than a Danish name, and from his mother he probably also inherited the streak of stubbornness and independence which made up a conspicuous part of his personality.

Winge showed his first recorded sign of independence when he began to study at the Copenhagen University in 1905, after having graduated from the Marselisborg High School in Aarhus. His parents apparently did not encourage his interests in natural history, and in order to fulfil a promise to his family, he spent his first few months at the university studying law. However, his interests in natural history were too deeply rooted, and he soon decided to switch to the Faculty of Science.

Academic Work

Already during his high school years, Winge had become deeply interested in mycology, and although Aarhus was not at that time a university town he was fortunate enough to have the guidance of two excellent mycologists. One, Poul Larsen, was a micromycete specialist who was then a teacher of biology at various Aarhus schools. Poul Larsen has published a number of important papers on mycology, including a monograph on the fungi of Iceland. Winge’s other mentor, C. Ferdinandsen, was to become his lifelong friend. Ferdinandsen was at that time a private tutor to a noble family living at the nearby mansion of ‘Sophiendal’ where Winge was a frequent visitor.

Ferdinandsen later became Professor of Plant Pathology at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College in Copenhagen where his department was next door to Winge’s Department of Genetics. Over a period of almost 30 years Ferdinandsen and Winge continued to publish a number of papers on mycology, the last one being a mycological  flora (in Danish) which, until a few years ago, was the most widely used Danish field handbook of the higher fungi. This early mycological training proved very useful to winge when years later he began to work on the genetics of yeasts.

In 1910 Winge graduated from the Copenhagen University with a ‘Mag. Scient.’ degree in botany. He had specialized in mycology, and when he took his degree he had already published, in collaboration with Ferdinandsen, six papers on mycological subjects. At the university his major teachers were eugenius warming, the Professor of Botany; l. Kolderup Rosenvinge, the Professor of Cryptogamic Botany, and Wilhelm Johannsen who was Professor of Plant Physiology.

Research and Contributions

After graduation Winge’s career was straightforward and can be briefly summarized. He spent the first two years abroad studying chromosome cytology, first at the University of Stockholm (Stockholm's Hogskola) under Rosenberg and Lagerheim. From there he went to the Sorbonne in Paris where he studied the cytology of fungi in Dangeard’s department, and finally he went to the United States where he worked in the laboratory of Coulter and Chamberlain in Chicago. These studies were made possible by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation.

It was Winge’s mycological work which had convinced him that chromosome cytology, a field which was at that time almost unknown in Denmark, would be of importance to his future work. It appears from his grant application that already at that time he realized the importance of chromosome cytology to the study of genetics, something which he had hardly learned from his teacher Johannsen. However, from the report which he wrote to the Carlsberg Foundation upon his return to Copenhagen it is evident that his scientific outlook was still that of a mycologist and a cytologist.

Upon his return to Copenhagen winge was appointed a research assistant to Professor Johannes Schmidt who was director of the department of Physiology at the Carlsberg laboratory. He stayed with Schmidt until 1921 when he was given the first chair in genetics in Denmark at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College. When Schmidt died in 1933 Winge returned to the Carlsberg laboratory as his successor. He retired from the directorship in 1956 at the age of 70. However, he continued to supervise the hop and barley breeding work which he had carried out at the farm ‘Nordgaarden’ since 1939, and he did not retire from this work until January 1963.

In the Charter of the Carlsberg laboratories it is stated that the aim of the laboratories is ‘by independent investigation to test the doctrines already furnished by science, and by constant studies to develop them into as fully a scientific basis as possible for the operations of malting, brewing and fermentation’. This Charter has always been very liberally interpreted, and the directors of the laboratories have full freedom to pursue basic research, but it is expected that this basic research has some connection with problems related to the brewing industry.

Winge was especially well qualified to tackle the problems of yeast genetics because, unlike most other geneticists, he had worked on mycological problems for more than 20 years. He went about the task of developing yeast genetics with great enthusiasm. He first built up his stock cultures, next he made his tools, new growth chambers and new gadgets for micro-manipulation. He was rewarded in 1935 when he could show that yeast reproduces sexually and has a regular haplophase-diplophase cycle (37). This was a most important breakthrough in yeast biology. Although it had been known for many years that yeast species sporulate, it was assumed that the propagation was either exclusively vegetative or apomictic. Winge’s discovery was therefore met with the greatest skepticism by the leading yeast biologists, notably by the Frenchman Guilliermond. A few years later Winge, in collaboration with Otto Laustsen, published the first case of mendelian segregation in yeast (40) and the road was now open to a systematic study of yeast genetics; a field of genetics which is now pursued vigorously in laboratories all over the world.

In the following years Winge’s contributions to yeast genetics comprised -among other works- an investigation of a balanced lethal system in Saccharomycodes Ludwigii; a somewhat controversial investigation of cytoplasmic inheritance in yeast; and in the later years a number of investigations on the inheritance of fermentation ability in yeast.

The later works were all published in collaboration with the American-born geneticist Catherine Roberts, one of the few geneticists who collaborated closely with Winge over a long period of years. All these investigations showed Winge’s complete mastery of formal genetics, and the investigations on the inheritance of fermentation ability have demonstrated a number of clear cut examples of the classical types of gene interaction. Whereas Winge was a complete master of the methods and of the many pitfalls of formal genetics, he never became a biochemical or molecular geneticist in the modern sense of the word. His training, more than 30 years back, had been in natural history (botany, zoology, geology and geography), and biochemistry had hardly been invented at that time.

References: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society; The Ecology and Evolution of Non-Domesticated Saccharomyces Species by Primrose J. Boynton and Duncan Greig (Wiley Online Library); Genome Evolution Across 1,011 Saccharomyces Cerevisiae Isolates (2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited)