Professor Stanisław Wolfarth, Ph.D., M.D. (1933-2007).

OBITUARY Biography of Professor Stanis³aw Wolfarth, an excellent scientist and honorable man, is a history of a man, who despite very difficult beginning of his career, achieved great success in his life being a self-made man. He accomplished this owning to his talent and hard work, and most of all, to strong character and passion for knowledge. in Gostyñ, a small town in the Poznañskie region, in which his father was a starost (the chief executive official of the district). He was 6 years old when World War II broke out, and this was the last time when he saw his father, who left home in September 1939 to join defenders of Warsaw from Nazi Germany. His father never returned home again, and later it came out that he died in the concentration camp in Ooewiêcim in 1942. During the occupation of Poland, young Wolfarth was taught at home by a priest, harbored by his mother, and after the end of WWII, in a secondary school in Gostyñ. However, he did not graduate from this school, since his mother was harassed by communis-tic administration as so-called " private enterpriser " (she tried to manage a private café after the war) and was unable to support him. His living circumstances constrained him to start working when he was 16 years old. At the beginning, he worked as a waiter, clerk, cafeteria manager, then he was called up to the army, and as a " uncertain element " , he was assigned to the famous Labor Battalion in the " Piast " mine, where he had been working for 2 years. After he was released from service in the army, he started working again, now as an electrician and senior packer. In 1956, he was granted a secondary-school certificate from the Jan Sobieski Second Secondary School after he successfully passed the examination as a candidate from outside the school. Then, he commenced studies at the Faculty of Medicine of the Medical Academy in Kraków, from where he graduated in 1963 and was granted a certificate of general practitioner. Immediately after graduation, he started scientific work, first as a volunteer then as a postgraduate student at, formerly, the Department of Pharmacology, Polish Academy of Sciences (later transformed into Institute), where he was working until 2006, i.e. 43 years. There he prepared his doctor's thesis entitled