In Appreciation of Klaus D. Kallman James W. Atz¹ and Steven Kazianis^2,* ¹Department of Ichthyology, Division of Vertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024-5192, U.S.A. ²Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Southwest Texas State University, 419 Centennial Hall, 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX 78666-4616, U.S.A. Key  words:  Xiphophorus, Xiphophorus maculatus To be exactly the right person in the right place at the right time does not often happen. When being the right person means  having  the  potential  to  become  one  of  the  world’s greatest  fish  geneticists,  the  probability  of  this  happening drops close to zero. However, hindsight makes even minus- cule possibilities look good. Adjunct Professor Myron Gor- don  of  the  Graduate  School  of  Arts  and  Science  of  New York  University  certainly  did  not  have  such  prescience when, in 1953, he first met Klaus D. Kallman, a new gradu- ate  student  looking  for  a  sponsor  to  direct  his  doctoral studies.  Kallman  had  led  a  serious  life.  He  was  born  in Berlin in 1928 and grew up there throughout the war and into the Russian occupation. He and his family eventually emigrated  to  the  United  States,  where  he  continued  his education at Queens College and received his B.S. degree in 1952.  He  had  developed  a  keen  interest  in  genetics  as  a teenager  in  Germany  and  had  heard  about  Dr.  Gordon’s laboratory.  When  he  saw  the  different  platyfishes  and swordtails  attractively  disporting  themselves,  he  gladly  ac- cepted Gordon’s offer to sponsor him. In less than a year, using  a  strain  of  platyfish  Gordon  had  inbred  for  16  gen- erations  of  brother-to-sister  matings,  making  them  as  ge- netically alike as identical twins, Kallman was able to begin his pioneering experiments on the immune system of fish. In  1955  he  was  awarded  his  M.S.  degree  and  in  1959  his Ph.D.  Dr.  Kallman  also  received  an  honorary  Ph.D.  from the University of Hamburg in 1992. Kallman’s experiments indicated that a fish’s immune system accepts or rejects transplanted tissue in a way similar to  that  of  the  well-known  mammalian  model,  the  labora- tory mouse. It was up to him to develop a transplantation technique  that  worked  with  small  fish.  Each  experimental animal had to be treated in precisely the same way to avoid uncontrolled variations. Moreover, Kallman was planning to make thousands of transplants;  therefore,  he  practiced  transplanting  fins  and other  organs  from  one  small  fish  to  another  until  it  took him  less  than  1  minute  to  complete  each  operation.  For more  than  a  decade  after  publishing  his  doctoral  thesis, Kallman  used  his  hard-won  technique  to  demonstrate  the existence  of  individual  parthenogenetic  fish,  to  study  self- fertilizing  and  gynogenetic  species,  to  utilize  the  latter  in experiments with organ transplants, and to analyze the ge- netic structure of natural fish populations (Kallman, 1970). Kallman had met his first major scientific problem and had satisfactorily mastered it. Meanwhile,  Kallman  was  becoming  familiar  with  the complex operations of Gordon’s meticulous genetics labo- ratory,  particularly  the  record  system  of  3-by-5  cards  that tracked  the  complete  pedigree  of  each  fish  along  with  its color pattern, birth, matings, and the final disposition of its body.  Furthermore,  more  than  600  aquaria  had  to  be  ac- counted for, each duly labeled with its inhabitants. Genetic experiments  usually  involve  several  generations  spanning Received January 31, 2001; accepted March 30, 2001. *Corresponding   author:   telephone   512-245-0358;   fax   512-245-1922;   e-mail sk13@swt.edu Mar. Biotechnol. 3, S3–S5, 2001 DOI: 10.1007/s10126-001-0021-6 © 2001 Springer-Verlag New York Inc. Next >>