Otakar Koldovsky, MD, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics

My friend died suddenly on April 5 in his home. In an e-mail message, Otakar wrote to me that he fell off a podium in New Zealand and then got up and presented his work, pointing out that he had fallen into another hole 40 years ago in Warsaw, and that within no time Stalin had died; he asked who was going to die this time. Well, it was Dr. Otakar Koldovsky himself. We shall always miss him, not only for his science but also for his humanity and his sense of humor. I met him in the fifties, when he started as a student im my laboratory in Prague. He very soon found his research feet and started to examine the development of the intestine in rats and human fetuses. For this work he was awarded a CIBA prize in London. Once, when visiting England, he was asked by the customs officer for the purpose of his trip. He replied: ‘To study the everted sac of Professor Smith.’ Our group was interested in long-term development, and it was Otakar, together with Dr. Kubat, who first showed that plasma cholesterol in the adult rat is conditioned by early nutrition. In 1968, many of us left Czechoslovakia for good. Otakar ended up in the Pediatric Department in Philadelphia, where he not only discovered new aspects of digestion, but at the same time studied to obtain an American qualification as a physician. This was hard