Obituary: Marc Leng

th Marc Leng who died on the 7 of May 2000 at the age of 64 from pleural cancer has made an important contribution in the field of Biophysics. Through years of successful studies on deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) and on the mechanism of action ofthe well-known anticancer drug cisplatin, he gained high international standing and generated more than 200 publications and 3 patents. His death is a great loss for the scientific community as a whole. Marc was a pure scientist. Honest, direct, he was a man of his word. He was a hard worker and had a constant intellectual curiosity. Outside scientific matters, he had eclectic tastes from reading to playing tennis or gardening. He was an expert on wine particularly that coming from his childhood region. Marc Leng was born in Bordeaux in the south west of France in 1935, the son of a medical doctor. He kept a fond memory, of his childhood and never totally lost his Bordeaux accent. In 1958, he obtained an engineering diploma in chemistry at the Ecole Nationale Sup6rieure de Chimie in Bordeaux. Being interested in fundamental research and in macromolecules, he started a PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Benoit at the Centre de Recherche sur les macromol6cules (CRM) in Strasbourg. That was the start of a successful career in the CNRS. During these years, he entered the field of polymer chemistry. At the time the CRM had just been created by Pr. Charles Sadron, the French pioneer of polymers science and of French biophysics. The first scientific task of this new research centre was to design and construct apparatus enabling precise characterisation of polymer molecules in dilute solution. Marc’s major interest within this area of research was the use of light scattering in the study of synthetic polymers. He graduated from the University of Strasbourg in 1962 and spent the next year and a half fulfillinghis military service commitment in the Navy. Following this interlude, he moved to the laboratory of Dr. Garry Felsenfeld as a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH (Bethesda) to pursue his interest in biological macromolecules and particularly in nucleic acids. He began to study DNA on its own or in interaction with polymers of lysine and arginine. It was at that point that he began his lifelong scientific adventure n the DNA world. He discovered that polylysine interacts preferentially with A.T rich DNA. This work was commented on in Nature (1969), 223, 1101 and was qualified as a remarkable finding. During that time working together, Dr. Felsenfeld and Marc became close friends, a relationship that would continue throughout Marc’s life and until his last moments.