Marcus C. Schaub passed away on October 30, 2018 at the age of 82 years. He leaves behind a multifaceted and rich legacy beyond the Swiss borders and it is a great honor for us, mentees and close collaborators of his, to review once again the different stages of his career and life.

Marcus graduated from the Medical School of the University of Basel in 1961, where he also completed his doctorate in medicine (Dr. med.). Unsatisfied by—as he used to say—the empiricism of medical practice, he started his research career at the Max-Planck Institute in Munich and subsequently worked in Prof. Samuel V. Perry’s laboratory at the University of Birmingham, UK, in the then just emerging research field of muscle biochemistry, where he completed his PhD (Dr. phil. nat.). These years abroad—which he later referred to as a privilege—with his wife Nina and their three young children had a lasting impact on the young inquisitive physician eager for knowledge. Winkingly, he wrote in his epitaph for his PhD supervisor: “He (Perry) strongly held that biochemistry is closely related to gourmet cooking” and further “He was mindful of my clean and punctual qualities” (Schaub 2010b). Qualities, of course, expected from a man of Swiss origin and which ultimately paid off in his laboratory work, where meticulous accuracy was a “conditio sine qua non” for chromatography with Sephadex. From those years, Marcus’s pioneering discoveries on the regulation of muscle contraction followed (Schaub and Perry 1969, 1971; Schaub et al. 1972) and together with the discoveries from Setsuro Ebashi’s laboratory in Tokyo and John Gergely’s laboratory in Boston, they culminated in the novel consensus on troponin nomenclature at the memorable Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Muscle Contraction in 1972 (TnI-former troponin-B, TnC-former troponin-A, and TnT). As we all know, nowadays troponins are key biomarkers of myocardial damage and form an integral and essential part of patient care in cardiology and general medicine alike. Despite the at times cumbersome laboratory work and the many frustrations inherent to research, Marcus still managed to enjoy the campus life in Birmingham, the “halcyon British way of life”, as he used to say. Even decades later, he indulged his passion of English tea ceremony with a cup of Tetley in the afternoon, when reading new publications in his office at the University of Zurich.

In 1970, Marcus had the opportunity to return to Switzerland to join the group of Prof. Peter G. Waser at the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Zurich, where he was appointed Professor of Pharmacology in 1980. As one of the primary lecturers in Pharmacology, he taught generations of medical and pharmacy students in his iconic, engaging, and highly didactic classes. I do very well recall his lectures on muscle contraction as if they had been yesterday. We learned, for example, why our heart, despite being exposed to rigorous workload, does not become sore as opposed to skeletal muscle. We were thrilled to understand how the arrow poison curare and succinylcholine—drugs that I am still using in my anesthetic practice—differentially affect nicotinic acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction. Not to forget his legendary review course in Pharmacology, which he organized with his colleagues Prof. Lichtensteiger and Prof. Hopf, to ease the students’ stress and to prepare them well for the looming exams. Marcus was an exceptionally gifted and passionate speaker who could fascinate his audience, students and peers alike. He was also notorious for his somewhat difficult, at times even redoubtable questions posed at poster sessions at national and international meetings, particularly among younger colleagues. However, the sole intention behind his questions was to engage specifically the younger colleagues and to foster vivid scientific discussions. When confronted years later, he disclosed that his questions were out of pure “childlike” curiosity.

His research at the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology was conducted in close collaboration with his good friend and colleague Prof. Hans M. Eppenberger, Head of the Institute of Cell Biology, ETH Zurich, with whom he—oddly enough—shared the same kindergarten and many years of primary and high school. He focused on contractile proteins, namely myosin heavy and light chain isoforms (Eppenberger et al. 1988; Schaub and Hirzel 1987; Schaub et al. 1984; Sutsch et al. 1992), on key structural proteins such as utrophin and dystrophin (Zuellig et al. 2000), on calcium handling in muscle contraction (Schaub et al. 2006; Schaub and Heizmann 2008), and on intracellular signaling in cardiac hypertrophy (Gosteli-Peter et al. 1996; Harder et al. 1996; Hefti et al. 1997; Schaub et al. 1998). Marcus was a skilled graphic designer and he loved the visual arts. He used to spend hours of creating figures detailing all the complex interactions among receptors, signaling pathways and calcium handling. Eliana (my wife) and myself had the privilege and pleasure to collaborate with Marcus from 2000 to 2008, first in his own laboratory (at campus Irchel) and later in our own laboratory at the University Hospital of Zurich, when we unraveled the mechanisms of volatile anesthetic-induced cardioprotection (Zaugg et al. 2002). Marcus always encouraged us to test the results from laboratory experiments in the clinical setting, something that we successfully achieved when we explored the mechanisms of volatile anesthetic-induced cardioprotection in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery (Lucchinetti et al. 2007). Marcus was further instrumental and a great source of advice in our studies on the mitochondrial phosphoproteome (Feng et al. 2008) and the adenine nucleotide translocator-1 (Feng et al. 2010), where we took advantage of the elegant yeast model. He was a true translational scientist and an exceptional mentor, who was able to take a “humble back seat” and enjoy secretly when his mentees and trainees were in the spotlight. He was not the kind of “mentor” who just mentors to be co-authored, a type of “mentorship” unfortunately far too common.

With two important legacies, one for Swiss heart research and one for European muscle research, Marcus leaves behind two veritable “pearls”. Together with three other colleagues, Marcus founded the “International Workshop on Cardiomyocyte Biology”. This workshop took place for the first time in 1994 and since then every three years at the congress center Monte Verità in Ascona (http://www.cardioascona.ch/). For many years, he was one of the main organizers and even up to recently, as member of the Scientific Board, he made sure that the most interesting and hottest topics were tabled in the program and that the best world-renowned researchers were invited for keynote lectures, providing an outstanding educational experience for all participants (Linke and Schaub 2013; Schaub and Abriel 2016; Schaub and Kleber 2010). The second legacy was clearly inspired by the “Golden days of British muscle Biochemistry”. Marcus founded the “European Society of Muscle Research (ESMR)” in 1971, where he served more than 25 years as chairman. Initially,—Marcus amused to tell—ESMR had the dubious name European Muscle Club suggestive of a body building club rather than a thought-minded research society. Marcus narrates in one of his excellent articles about the birth and evolution of ESMR (Schaub 2008, 2010a), which I can highly recommend as further reading, that there was indeed a breathtaking body building performance at the memorable 1985 congress in Ulm, Germany. Eventually, bodybuilding is only a kind of applied myology, right?

Marcus had an extremely broad and profound knowledge in science and medicine, but he was at the same time interested in many other things including theater, fine arts, economics and sociopolitical topics. After his frequent visits to Zurich’s arts galleries, he used to invite all his colleagues to the famous Café Odeon, a world-renowned cozy meeting place for all sorts of intellectuals and artists, to continue his vivid discussions. Marcus and his wife Nina loved to invite friends for dinner. These stimulating nights were flavored with Marcus’s highly entertaining anecdotes. Probably not many people know that Marcus himself was a painter, occasionally giving away one of his paintings to very close friends.

I liked Marcus’s presentations most where he amalgamated science and arts and transformed the resulting findings and intuition back into the reality of the human society. From these presentations and the many discussions on all contrivable topics we had together, I am certain that he did not like the idea of the “Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins (Dawkins 1976), but that he strongly advocated for the perception of life as a sort of music created by the complex interaction between all the diverse biomolecules [“Music of Life” by Denis Noble (Noble 2006)]. The allusion in my title of this obituary to Stephen Hawking’s famous book “A brief history of time” (Hawking 1988) is intentional, as both men, Stephen and Marcus, shared the same unconditional passion for science (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Marcus C. Schaub presenting at the farewell symposium of Prof. C. Heizmann (2007, Zurich, Switzerland; picture kindly provided by Prof. C. Heizmann)

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I would like to close with Marcus’s own words taken from his ingenious essay where he describes “Ambiguity in the heart, art, and science” (Schaub 2013):

This brings us back to science, where a lot more is required to design inventive new hypothesis-driven research, including such qualities as imagination, innovation, unconventional approaches, inspiration and exchange of ideas between the young and the more experienced elders, enthusiasm, fervor and, above all, a warm heart.