Peter Wolk, professor in the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, enrolled in a biology class in middle school. He disliked it so much that he did not take another biology class until his junior year of college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“In 7th grade, I had a teacher who did not make science interesting,” Wolk said. “He was talking about the names of bones, and if that was what biology was, I did not want to pursue it.”
When Wolk was a junior in college, he realized he was interested in kinds of life and how creatures interact with one another. He went to graduate school at Rockefeller Institute where he met Anton Lang, who would later be the founding director of the MSU-AEC Plant Research Laboratory, now called the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory.
Lang accepted Wolk to join his laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Wolk worked with red seaweeds during the days in his lab, and studied blue-green algae during the evenings and weekends.
Lang received the task of creating the Plant Research Laboratory at MSU 50 years ago, and brought Wolk with him to be an assistant professor.
The lab was created in 1965 because there was a great deal of knowledge being developed about animals, but if there were to be a nuclear holocaust, it would be important to know about plants as well as animals. One idea was to have biologists in this laboratory work with plants and radiation.
Wolk said he was very glad to come to Michigan and has enjoyed his time at the Lab.
“My favorite part about the Plant Research Lab is the quality of the people, and that’s quality in terms of being fine humans and splendid scientists,” Wolk said.
Wolk said MSU is different from other universities because of its strong background in agriculture that allows connections between researchers at the Department of Plant Biology, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences and others.