In Memoriam

Peter Dehm

Colleagues throughout the worldwide connective tissue community have ex­pressed their shock and sympathy at the sudden passing of Dr. Peter Dehm on October 25, 1980. It is particularly difficult to understand the loss of such an imaginative investigator in the prime of his career with so many plans and ideas yet before .hirn. Peter's absence from our midst creates a profound professional void and a deep personal loss.

Dr. Dehm was born in Munich on July 8, 1941. He developed an abiding interest in and a broad appreciation of the world of biology in his horne and at the hand of his father, a professor of geology and paleontology at the University of Munieh. Peter attended that University and the University of Tübingen and received his doctorate at Munich in 1969 und er the direction of Dr. A. Nordwig. His predoctoral work was recognized in the European biochemistry community by the publication of five seminal scientific reports in widely respected and criti­cally reviewed journals. His postdoctoral appointment was in the Department of Bio­chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania under Professor Darwin J. Prockop. While working elosely with Prockop, Olsen, Uitto, Grant and Kivirikko, he published more than a dozen distinctive contributions on the structure, biosyn­thesis, and regulation of collagen. Their laboratory, in which Dr. Dehm playcd a crucial role, was at the forefront in identifying the precursor form of collagen called procollagen. His work was recognized by an invitation from Professor Prockop to move with hirn to Rutgers University in New Jersey, which he accept­ed. Dr. Dehm later returned to his native Germany as a research associate at thc Max-Planck-Institut für Zell-Biologie in Wilhelmshaven, where he married Dr. Marlene Karakashian, also a scientist at the Institute. After studying protein kin­ases in Acetabularia, the Dehms returned to Philadelphia to join the laboratory of Professor Nicholas A. Kefalides in 1975. It was with Kefalides that Dr. Dehm made what many considered his most outstanding scientific contribution - the isolation of a major component of basement membranes which has strong struc­tural homology with previously characterized interstitial collagens. This establish­ed a firm structural relationship between these morphologically distinct connective tissue components and paved the way for the rapid upsurge in the study of base­ment membrane structure and function in many laboratories throughout the world.

In 1979 Dr. Dehm became Associate Professor of Research Medizine at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston. Here he established a bio­chemistry laboratory and, with his wife as a elose collaborating colleague, was continuing his structural and biosynthetic investigation of basement membrane collagen when his untimely illness and death brought his promising and developing career to an end.

Colleagues in Charleston came to realize the deep commitment Peter Dehm had to the understanding of biologie phenomena of all types. His was a unique co m­bination of critical judgment and generous, gentle cooperation. Both this critique and his gende friendship are deeply missed.

Dr. E. Carwile LeRoy, Division of Rheumatology and Immunology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina 29425.