Lennart Philipson died on June 26,

2011. His passing is a great loss to the

worldwide biomedical research community.

He was a big man—physically, emotionally

and operationally, dominating

rooms, psyches and institutions. He was

my wonderful friend, and when Lennart

became your friend, it filled a big need in

your life

Baltimore, David

English

Caltech Authors - Main

Lennart Philipson (1929-2011): A Warrior Has Passed Obituary

Obituary
Lennart Philipson (1929–2011): A Warrior Has Passed
David Baltimore*
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States of America
Lennart Philipson died on June 26,
2011. His passing is a great loss to the
worldwide biomedical research communi-
ty. He was a big man—physically, emo-
tionally and operationally, dominating
rooms, psyches and institutions. He was
my wonderful friend, and when Lennart
became your friend, it filled a big need in
your life.
Lennart was a Swedish virologist/mi-
crobiologist who earned both an MD and
a PhD in 1957–1958, the latter for work
on respiratory viruses. He then went to the
Rockefeller University for post-doctoral
work in virology, returning after a couple
of years to the Wallenberg Laboratory in
Sweden’s Uppsala University, where he
established his own laboratory. It hap-
pened that I entered the Rockefeller
University just after Lennart left and did
my thesis work on the same floor where he
had worked. You could still feel his
presence. So many ice buckets had his
name on them, and if you paged back in
the centrifuge log, it was all Philipson.
People talked about his energy, his inten-
sity, and his formidable persona. I was
excited to meet him on a return trip to the
United States and quickly saw why he was
so unforgettable.
Virology has enjoyed a golden era over
the past 50 years, largely because advances
in molecular methods could be rapidly
applied to viruses to uncover remarkable
molecular details. Lennart flourished in
this environment, quickly rising to prom-
inence as he concentrated first on picor-
naviruses and then on adenoviruses. Al-
ways staying au courant with the latest
technology, Lennart was poised to ride
each new wave of technological advance
as it unfolded. He is particularly noted for
his work on the cellular receptors for
viruses, on the assembly of adenoviruses,
and on the control of adenovirus gene
expression, but he made contributions to
fields as disparate as serology and structure
determination and everything in between.
He later studied genes that inhibit cellular
growth.
Lennart did a sabbatical in my labora-
tory and quickly made himself at home:
soon I wondered if he or I was running the
show. He orchestrated a very important
set of experiments, showing that synthesis
of the reverse transcriptase in murine
retroviruses comes about by suppression
of a termination codon. This work solved
the vexing puzzle of how, from one open
reading frame, a major and a minor
product could emerge. I had a chance to
see up close what a force of nature he
could be in the laboratory.
Lennart was not only an important
scientist, he was also a great institutional
builder and administrator of science. By
1967 he had become the Director of the
Wallenberg Laboratory and went on to
play important roles in Swedish science. In
1982, his remarkable skills were recog-
nized on the European level by his
appointment as the second Director Gen-
eral of the European Molecular Biology
Laboratory (EMBL), which he ran until
1993. There he established a balance
between work on instrumentation and on
scientific objectives, insisting that most
group leaders stay for only a fixed time
so as to generate a constant renewal of the
staff. It was an inspired policy: many of the
leading scientists throughout Europe got
their start at EMBL. He also redirected
the scientific focus toward cellular and
developmental biology. Among his many
innovations at EMBL, Lennart realized
that computation was becoming an im-
portant part of biomedical research and
opened an outstation for biocomputation
that has been a major European window
on the growing world of genomic research.
In 1993 Lennart returned to the US to
be the Founding Director of the Skirball
Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at the
New York University School of Medicine.
He set high standards for recruitment and
brought a very strong group to Skirball.
He spent five years in New York, setting
up Skirball’s structure and establishing it
as an important unit within NYU. Many
of the people he recruited are still at
Skirball; he set them on a trajectory of
accomplishment and leadership. Today, in
fact, one of his recruits, Ruth Lehmann, is
its director. This legacy is a notable
example of what can be accomplished in
a semi-independent institute within a
larger academic structure.
After leaving Skirball, Lennart returned
to Stockholm, Sweden, where he joined
the Karolinska Institute and was Emeritus
Professor of Microbiology there when he
passed away. He stayed active in science
and was an author on a publication in
2011 describing the consequences of a
knockout of a receptor shared by coxsack-
ieviruses and adenoviruses. It was a
protein he had discovered almost 15 years
earlier.
He had been a foreign member of the
US National Academy of Sciences since
1992 and, of course, was a member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He
Lennart Philipson. Image credit: European
Molecular Biology Laboratory.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001153.g001
Citation: Baltimore D (2011) Lennart Philipson (1929–2011): A Warrior Has Passed. PLoS Biol 9(9): e1001153.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001153
Copyright:  2011 David Baltimore. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original author and source are credited.
Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: baltimo@caltech.edu
Published September 20, 2011
PLoS Biology | www.plosbiology.org 1 September 2011 | Volume 9 | Issue 9 | e1001153
consulted with many companies, notably
Astra in Sweden. He had many honorary
degrees.
Yet, science was not Lennart’s only
passion. He was devoted to his family. His
wife, Malin, was a partner in all the
challenges Lennart took on and remains a
gracious friend to all of Lennart’s associ-
ates. His boys were the apple of his eye
and their successes in life were a source of
great pride. Swedes know how to do
summer, and for Lennart and Malin, their
summer home was a key release from the
pressures of busy lives. Lennart was an
excellent sailor; he even spent two years at
sea when he was young. He and Malin,
along with my wife and I and many other
friends, rented sailing boats around the
world. Our most remarkable time was
sailing in the northern islands of the
Kingdom of Tonga, in the South Pacific.
Lennart was a remarkable captain who let
others run the ship until that moment
when leadership and experience were
needed—then he took over and got the
ship through the tough patch.
All who knew Lennart will remember
him with a pipe in his mouth, furiously
smoking the Prince Albert tobacco he
imported from the US. He would leave
residues of his tobacco on the sides of the
boats we sailed because he tamped out the
ashes of used tobacco on the boat’s
gunwale.
Lennart was a rare and irreplaceable
person, a true individual. His science was
path-finding, his leadership strong and
imaginative, his friendship deep. He will
be missed by all who knew him.
Editor’s note: The editors at PLoS
Biology recognize the life and work of
Lennart Philipson and are grateful for his
years of service on the journal’s editorial
board.
PLoS Biology | www.plosbiology.org 2 September 2011 | Volume 9 | Issue 9 | e1001153


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