"Wonderful street-car meeting" - Plant virology at Stuttgart makes a name for itself

When Mundry first brought the tobacco mosaic virus to a German university, there were only a few other non-university work groups dealing with plant virology. To avoid becoming isolated and to establish this discipline in Germany, Mundry's department organised the first ever European Plant Virologists' Conference in Stuttgart in June 1980. It was continued under various working titles in the years that followed in numerous other European cities (including Strasbourg, Wageningen (NL), Littlehampton (UK), Riga, Paris, Madrid, and others). The reputation of Stuttgart's plant virologists benefited greatly from this first meeting, not least of all due to the good organisation and the unique atmosphere.

Mundry recalls:

"Back then all you needed was to make a few dozen phone calls to colleagues in Germany and abroad in the leading institutions and 5000 marks in funding to organise an informal three-day symposium with the working title of "Central European Virus and Plant Cell Conference" ("CEVAPCC"). All the delegates were lodged in the "Löwen" hotel in Stuttgart-Wangen, two tram stops from our old provisional institute in Ulmer Straße. There were to be three members in each work group, with at least one PhD student or post-doc. The number of delegates was strictly limited to 44, because, as a social event for the second evening of the meeting, I had reserved the Stuttgart tram company's party carriage and that only held 44 people. Everyone was astonished and totally over the moon when it stopped directly outside our institute. With buttered pretzels, good wine and lively dance music, the atmosphere was very bubbly. [...] The older generation still reminisce about the 'wonderful street-car meeting in Stuttgart'."