In Memoriam: Laurentiu Mircea Popescu (1944–2015)

The world of cellular and molecular medicine is deeply saddened and shocked by the tragic news that Professor Laurentiu Mircea Popescu has passed away due to lung cancer on Monday morning of August 3, 2015. Professor Popescu was a world-recognized leader of cellular and molecular medicine and worked in the University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, since 1991 before becoming the General Director of ‘Victor Babeș’ National Institute of Pathology, Fellow of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, and President of the Medical Sciences Section of the Romanian Academy of Sciences. He was selected as vice-President of the Federation of the European Academies of Medicine during 2010–2011 and became the President in 2012. He was also the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. ‘The book has to be written by scientists and it has to tell the world of the true cellular and molecular story about telocytes. Telocytes are connecting cells, while we are connecting people’ wrote Professor Popescu. I could not believe that these were the last words I got weeks ago from Prof Popescu, a science colleague, life friend, career supervisor, and respected leader. Professor Popescu and I have been planning to write a book on telocytes for almost 2 years and finally decided ‘Telocytes: Connecting Cells’ as the name of the book in the beginning of 2015. All of the authors feel the honor and responsibility in writing their own chapters in memory of Prof Popescu who discovered and coined the term ‘telocytes’ in 2010. Professor Popescu provided us with leadership and his global and deep vision on telocyte science inspired and encouraged all of us. He was labeled as the father of telocytes, and leaves behind a large number of remarkable milestones and legacies, especially on telocytes. Professor Faussone-Pellegrini, as a pioneer scientist of the interstitial cell of Cajal, was impressed by Professor Popescu’s enthusiasm in the research field of telocytes and remembered that she was contacted and convinced to initially collaborate on the interstitial cell of Cajal. After they published a number of papers where Professor Popescu named those cells as interstitial Cajal-like cells, Professor Popescu suddenly appeared at her laboratory and told her that the name of interstitial Cajal-like cells needed to be reconsidered. After a long discussion with colleagues, Professor Popescu decided to think out of the box and preferred to call the term ‘telocyte’ on the basis of the suggested name ‘teledendrocyte: tele = far away, dendro =ramifications/branches/processes, cyte = cell’. Among different opinions and suggestions, Professor Popescu showed his leadership capacity and insisted on the name of telocyte as a term easier to remember/ use. Professors Popescu and Faussone-Pellegrini published a milestone editorial titled ‘TELOCYTES a case of serendipity: the winding way from interstitial cells of Cajal, via interstitial Cajal-like cells to TELOCYTES’ in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine in 2010 and officially announced the start of a telocyte era. After that, Professor Popescu took global leading roles in telocyte research and shared his knowledge and experience with scientists around the world. His vision in the field of telocytes and cellular and molecular medicine is legendary. He was one of the first to realize that telocytes were located in multi-organs/tissues, to propose the existence of ‘Telocytes/Stem-Cells Tandem’ working in so-called ‘Stem Cell Niches’, and to identify three-dimensional structures and morphology of telocytes. The Telocyte concept is well accepted by hundreds of scientists from more than 60 universities located in 30 countries. I started the investigation of lung telocytes in the middle of 2010 and wrote to Professor Popescu for an ‘urgent help’ when I thought the mission to be impossible. With direct supervision of Professor Popescu, telocytes were firstly isolated from human trachea and lungs in our laboratory and cultured in an in vitro system. In order to identify the difference *Correspondence to: Xiangdong WANG, M.D., Ph.D. E-mail: [email protected]