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Professor Ronald Hancock has died
It is with deep regret that we announce that on October 4th , 2022, at the age of eighty-nine, a great friend of Polish science, Professor Ronald Hancock, died. Visiting professor and lecturer at the Department of Engineering and Systems Biology at the Faculty of Automatic Control, Electronics and Computer Science.
Professor Ronald Hancock was born in 1933 in England, in Epsom (now a district of London). After the war, he completed his studies and obtained a PhD in microbiology from the University of Cambridge. After graduation, he worked for several years as an intern - the so-called postdoc at the famous Harvard Medical School in Boston, United States, where he had the opportunity to work with scientists of the highest world renown, including Harold Amos. At Harvard Medical School, he became interested in research into genetic material and mechanisms regulating the formation of complexes and structures observed in cells and their participation in reading genetic information. He remained faithful to these interests throughout his life. After an internship, he moved to the Cancer Research Institute of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, where he took up the position of a freelance researcher. In 1986, he moved to Quebec, Canada, where he took up a position of professor and researcher at Laval University.
In 2010, he came to Poland for good. The professor was associated with Gliwice from the 1970s, when he made friends with professor Mieczysław Chorazy from the Institute of Oncology in Gliwice. Prof. Hancock was active in the organizing committee of the "Wilhelm Bernhard Workshop on the Cell Nucleus", it was an international conference initiated by Wilhelm Bernhard, which made it easier for scientists from behind the "iron curtain" to learn about the achievements of the rapidly developing cell biology and molecular biology and meet scientists from western institutions.
Prof. Hancock actively helped Polish scientists and the organizing committee in which he was active also financially supported the participation of "colleagues from the east" in the conferences. He supported the organization of international, specialized courses in the field of molecular biology organized in Poland, but also in other countries, e.g. after the war in Bosnia, he was one of the organizers and lecturers of the molecular biology course and organized a collection of books and scientific literature in Canada for scientific centres of devastated Bosnia.
In his laboratory in Lausanne and later in Canada, he accepted scholarship holders, PhD students, long-term and short-term postdoctoral fellowships. He settled in Poland also because he could still feel useful while lecturing at the University of Technology, supporting the English-language publishing work of his younger colleagues, but above all he had the opportunity to continue his research passions. Unfortunately, he did not complete his research on chromosomes and his theory of "crowding" forcing the formation of cellular structures.
He was a perfectionist and still missed the "last" experiment. Not without significance for his presence in Poland was also the fact that he married a Polish professor working in the same field with whom he lived for over 21 years.
We express our sincere regret and sympathy for the family, colleagues and friends, especially for his wife, Professor Joanna Rzeszowska.
The funeral ceremony will take place on October 15th at 11.00 in the chapel of the Central Cemetery in Gliwice at 120, Kozielska Street.