The beetle collecting behaviour of Zachariassen also had some humorous impacts on his family. When the children grew older and began to take walks in the Norwegian forests with friends and families they suddenly noticed that the members of these families did not walk in a bent over fashion always looking at the ground. His children simply were under the impression that in all families everyone would be always ABT-888 mw searching for beetles when walking in the forests. Many anecdotes have been told about Zachariassen among students, and in a way he was at the same time a living scandal (which he enjoyed being) due
to his frank and sometimes sweeping statements, but also one of the most popular teachers at his institute. In the era of Power Point presentations, Zachariassen mostly lectured brilliantly using blackboard and chalk, receiving considerable respect from students on this account. Visits to Zachariassen were never boring, always chaotic, and yet productive. Many are the times when we have visited him and either the car was broken, selleck kinase inhibitor the house had been
snowed-in, or one of the many kids had been behaving, somewhat undesirably in school, causing experiments to be postponed because of, in Zachariassen’s view, futile meetings with (possibly?) well-meaning teachers. At home after dinner, the evening was usually passed by sitting on the couch discussing science, looking
Florfenicol at results and doing calculations, all the time with the television turned on and volume turned extremely high and with Zachariassen smoking a number of those cigars, which we had brought from Denmark, and which Zachariassen usually did not buy because of the unbelievable prices on these kinds of goods in Norway. Zachariassen was one of the most unbiased and open-minded persons we have ever met. This extended both to science and to the way Zachariassen interacted with other people. He was always interested to hear other people’s opinions, learn about their lives and their trade and he was always extremely kind to students and younger scientists, helping out whenever he could in times of hardship. For example, sometime during the mid-nineties one of us (HR) was unemployed for some time. During this period Zacharissen invited me to work with him, several times paying all expenses. Obviously, such things were of great importance to our scientific development and in helping to create the possibilities of our future careers. Karl Erik Zachariassen’s death has left a large scientific, and for many of us a personal, void in the broad field of insect ecophysiology, an area in which he has been a leader for some 40 years. He will be greatly missed.