Remembering Claes Hellerström and those around him

I can still remember that early morning in May. I had picked up Susan Bonner-Weir, who had come to Uppsala to give the Kroc lecture of the year. We went to the neuropsychiatric ward at Ulleråker Hospital, where Claes Hellerstr€ om had spent the last couple of weeks after his devastating stroke four months earlier. I had learnt to interpret his body language in the sense that it was easy to understand when he liked what he heard or saw. There was no doubt that he very much enjoyed seeing Susan when sitting in his wheelchair in the garden under some apple trees in blossom. That chat was the last I had with Claes. A week later he passed away. On approaching the tenth anniversary of this sad event, we decided to commemorate him with a special issue of Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences. At the time of his death Claes was one of the two editors of the journal. Gunnar Ronquist was the other. The two of them had struggled with the revival of the journal (1) and had introduced electronic publishing. When I was asked by Gunnar Ronquist whether I would like to take over after Claes it was a point of honour for me to do so, keeping in mind the long tradition and history of the journal (2,3). At that time I had been following in his footsteps for some 40 years. So why not carry on? In particular I had assisted Claes as Associate Editor of Diabetologia for five years in the late 1980s. I can still remember how he spent hours formulating letters to authors—especially the refusals—that started with Claes praising the quality of the research reported (almost Nobel prize class) and ending with a very sad message that there was at present no space for the submitted article in the journal. We—and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Leif Jansson and Nils Welsh for a positive and fruitful collaboration—are very glad to be able to present a commemorative issue, filled with interesting observations and remarks on Claes’s long-term relationship with pancreatic islet research. Many more could have been included, but contributions from former students (Kjell Asplund, Michael Welsh, Leif Jansson, Decio Eizirik, and Ulf Eriksson), hosts for visits 1. L-R: Arne Andersson, Dave Sutherland and Claes Hellerstr€om Dave Sutherland, an outstanding pioneer in islet transplantation reseach, before the 1990 Kroc lecture, with Arne Andersson and Claes Hellerstr€om.