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Obituary In Memoriam Guido Boccardo (1944–2002) uido Boccardo, an internationally reknowned plant virologist and a dear friend, died of lung G cancer in November 2002, in Torino, Italy. He was born on January 11th , 1944 in Villata, a tiny village in the Po Valley rice region of Northern Italy, but spent much of his life in exotic places. Guido obtained an MS degree in Biology in 1968 at the University of Torino, and won a fellowship to work at the newly founded Istituto di Fitovirologia Applicata in Torino. He soon obtained a tenured research post. From the start he was the molecular expert of our small but tightly knit Torino virus group, and his dedication, skills and collaborative attitude soon became obvious. During this time he helped to isolate and characterize a series of new viruses from ornamental and agricultural crops. At the beginning of the 1970s, Guido spent a sabbatical at the Laboratory of Plant Pathology at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, University of Gembloux, Belgium, where he worked in R. Alaoui’s lab to characterize the RNA polymerase activity of viruslike particles from Penicillium stoloniferum. After returning to Torino, Guido started to work on the identification and electrophoretic separation of the dsRNA genome of maize rough dwarf virus (Fijivirus, Reoviridae), collaborating with Maurizio Conti, Vittoria Lisa, Enrico Luisoni and Bob Milne on the virus’ epidemiology, serological properties, particle morphology, protein composition and RNA. With various members of this team, he became interested in isolating the then very novel and curious cryptic viruses from different hosts, and in studying their dsRNA genomes. This led to collaboration with Tomohide and Keiko Natsuaki in the comparison of ‘cryptic’ viruses from Italy and ‘temperate’ viruses from Japan (which, in many cases, turned out to be identical) and he later worked on characterizing the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase activity associated with different cryptic viruses. In 1976 Guido was hired by the FAO as consultant phytopathologist in a project on Cadang-Cadang disease of coconuts in the Philippines, where he remained for two years to study the associated anomalous RNA (which turned out to be a viroid), working together with John Randles at the then Waite Institute, Adelaide, South Australia. This was Guido’s first experience with viroids, and also with rats eating the centrifuge wiring and cobras in the screenhouse! Soon, he was collaborating closely with Michel Dollet (Laboratoire de Virologie, IRHO/GERDAT, Montpellier, France) to identify the causal agent of a decline disease of coconuts in Vanuatu. In the early 1980s, Guido spent time in Australia (at the Department of Plant Pathology, Waite Agricultural Research Institute, University of Adelaide) where he continued his work on plant-infecting reoviruses with D.V.R. Reddy, Lindsey Black
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and Eishiro Shikata (Hokkaido University, Japan) and later with Richard Francki and T. Hatta at the Waite Institute. After returning to Torino, he continued working with re
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