Hans Thoenen: A Tribute

Hans Thoenen: 1928–2012 Hans Thoenen passed away on June 23, 2012, a fewmonths after being diagnosed with lung cancer. He left us grateful for what he had been able to accomplish in his life as scientist, but he was neither exuberant nor proud. Hans remained extraordinarily modest about his achievements—he felt far more comfortable by understating his contributions and never liked receiving compliments from colleagues he did not know well. Given the choice, he preferred to have critics than adulators around him. ‘‘At least the former are honest,’’ he would say. Loyalty was probably the quality Hans valued most in his interactions with others. He also was a realist, and when we both talked about his approaching death, his only regret was to leave his dear wife Sonja alone as he felt she may still need him. Hans knew well that without Sonja’s support, life as a scientist and group leader would have been much more difficult for him. Hans was born in Zweisimmen, a beautiful village located in the so-called Berner Oberland, just north of the French linguistic border. This was one of very few borders that Hans seemed to have had some respect for, and even this was surprising with Hans, as Swiss Germans are typically remarkable polyglots. The Swiss Alps made a great and lasting impression on him: strong feelings for freedom and independence characterize alpine dwellers, which may explain Hans’s lack of readiness to compromise on anything, including in his interactions with colleagues or journal editors. During the early part of his life, he was a passionate mountain climber. His expeditions were not limited to the Alps; his tours also took him to far off places, such as the Peruvian Andes. This attraction for adventurous undertakings explains his later passion for research and the riskier a project was, the more Hans liked it. One of his most striking traits was that he was fearless, especially with regard to the use new technologies, a key to his scientific endeavors, which he summarized in a recent autobiography (http://www.sfn.org/skins/main/ pdf/history_of_neuroscience/hon_vol_6/ c14.pdf). Incidentally, I found it surprising— but very fortunate—that Hans accepted to write this piece after an invitation from Larry Squire. He was apparently given unrestricted space to detail the many steps of his scientific trajectory and, remarkably, this piece seems not to have been edited much at all, so that posterity will still be able to enjoy Hans’s voice ‘‘à l’authentique.’’ While the scientific community is presumably most familiar with Hans’s achievements in the field of neurotrophic factors, fewer may know that his first scientific big bang came in the late 1960s, with the accidental discovery of 6-hydroxydopamine as a drug that could selectively kill noradrenergic terminals. In close collaboration with a dear colleague of his, Jean-Pierre Tranzer at Roche in Basel, they discovered through the use of electron microscopy that this drug selectively destroys sympathetic nerve endings. They suggested that 6-hydroxydopamine is taken up by these terminals