Heinz Siegfried Wolff, scientist and broadcaster, born 29 April 1928; died 15 December 2017.
For me, 2017 sees the passing of a significant ‘influencer’ of my childhood. Someone who not only showed me that science is interesting but also that it can be fun. Sadly, the name Heinz Wolff will need to join those of Carl Sagan and Jonas Salk.
I would meet Heinz in my front room where he presented BBC2’s The Great Egg Race. With his trademark bow tie, mad scientist look and his characteristic odd syntax and pronunciation. I was excited by his desire to come up with new ideas. I would often go back to my room after watching TV to try to do something amazing with transformers, motors, and magnets, but I usually failed. He looked and behaved like what I would call a "eccentric egghead," and he took pleasure in playing up to the stereotype in many ways. As I got older, I saw him more clearly as a serious, dedicated scientist and science advocate.
Heinz was born in Berlin, and grew up at the time of the emergence of the Nazi movement: he was later to recall that, at the age of five, he asked his father, Oswald, a volunteer in the first world war: “What is a Jew?” The Wolff family saw themselves Germans and his father used an understanding of business law to help fellow Jews get around the currency laws and escape. The Wolff family fled Germany and arrived in Britain on 3 September 1939, the day the second world war was declared. I remember hearing Heinz say, “We really cut it rather fine,” when he appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1998.
He went to school at the City of Oxford and then worked as a lab assistant at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford to study science. Before starting to work for the Medical Research Council, he worked in the physiology section of the National Institute for Medical Research. He then went to University College London to get degrees in both physics and physiology. As of 1962, he oversaw the institute's biomedical engineering department and had started doing what he loved most in life: engineering answers to people's problems. Wolff was one of those scientists who made things happen. From 1976 to 1982, he was a part of the European Space Agency's life science working group, he gave advice to the British National Space Centre, and he was on the board of the Edinburgh International Science Festival.
He founded the Brunel Institute for Bioengineering in 1983, now housed in the Heinz Wolff building at the university, and during a research career authored or co-authored around 120 papers in scientific journals. Brunel is where he orbited into my life once more, my father-in-law working as the university’s Chief Financial Officer was involved with some of his spin-out projects – once again underlining his innovative and entrepreneurial spirit.
For me, an avid fan, I remember Heinz fondly The Great Egg Race, which he hosted from 1979 to 1986. I was one of the many young people who watched him and were inspired to go into engineering or research as a job. Even though the show started with a simple question: how far could you move an egg using the kinetic energy stored in a rubber band? It got better. The imagination shown by using homemade gadgets and tools helped me get ready for my own PhD. In the end, Wolff said that a knitting needle and a pickled onion could be used to make a low friction bearing. I didn't go that far.
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