Talk:Henrik Kacser

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Anecdotes are not allowed in the main text of wikipedia articles. However I feel that the anecdotes provided here are of sufficient historical interest and reflect on the personality, the times he lived in and mode of thinking of Henrik Kacser that it is worth stating them for the record.

1. In 1955 Henrik Kacser was offered a lecturer position in the department of genetics. Before that he had just finished his Diploma of Animal Genetics. At the time he has no offer for work. One day he was walking down the corridor in the department and Conrad Hal Waddington passed him in the opposite direction. Waddington stopped, turned, lowered his pipe and asked Henrik what he was going to do now that he'd finished his Diploma. Henrik said he had no plans as yet. Waddington replied, well why not stay here? And that is how Henrik became a lecturer in the department of genetics (Sauro, personal communication).

2. Henrik's work on the control of flux and the hypothesis that the rate-limiting step was an erroneous concept started as a result of an observation of a mutant Aspergillus strain. He observed that a particular enzyme in one of the amino acid biosynthesis pathways had lost 95% of its activity and yet the phenotype appeared unchanged. It was this observation that prompted Henrik to realize that phenotypes are most likely determined by the network in which the enzyme belongs rather than the specific properties of the enzyme itself (Sauro, personal communication). Hsauro (talk) 21:40, 4 March 2015 (UTC)