Moselio Schaechter fungi stamp collection

Moselio “Elio” Schaechter was born in Milan, Italy, in 1928, the only child of Polish Jewish parents. His mother Victoria “Vicia” Wachsmann was the well-educated daughter of a book publisher and his father Abraham Isaac Schaechter was a salesman and a veteran of the Austrian navy. The family left Italy in September 1940 and arrived in Quito, Ecuador, in January 1941. Schaechter completed high school and some medical school in Ecuador.

Schaechter left Ecuador for the United States in January 1950, matriculating as a graduate student at the University of Kansas. In 1954, he earned a PhD in microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania. He married Barbara Thompson that year and was soon drafted into the Army during the Korean War, where he worked in a research lab at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C. After he was discharged, Schaechter was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the American Cancer Society in Copenhagen, Denmark from 1956 to 1958. In 1958, Schaechter joined the faculty at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In 1962, Schaechter received an offer from Tufts Medical School and the family relocated to Boston, Massachusetts. Schaechter remained at Tufts for 33 years, during which he chaired the microbiology department for 23 years. In 1984, he became the president of the American Society for Microbiology.

Schaechter’s wife Barbara died in 1988. They had two children together, Judith and John. In 1994, he married Edith Koppel (Wellisch) and moved to the San Diego, California area. Schaechter has written and co-authored 12 books, including one titled In the Company of Mushrooms about his “hobby of collecting and studying wild mushrooms.”

Sources:

Faculty Profile: Elio Schaechter. San Diego State University. Website ( http://www.bio.sdsu.edu/faculty/schaechter.htm). Accessed 5 Nov 2020.

Schaechter, Elio. 2012. Elio’s Memoirs. ASMblog. Website ( https://schaechter.asmblog.org/elios_memoirs/ ). Accessed 5 Nov 2020.