Still going Skou
He was born the year the last shot was fired in WWI. Took a higher doctoral degree in medical science at Aarhus University the same year that WWII ended. Was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the sodium-potassium pump a year where there were no major empires crumbling. But where princess Diana ended her days in a tunnel in Paris. And he reluctantly retired the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Nobel Prize winner, 96-year-old Jens Christian Skou, is a man with a past. And a future. As he has just had a scientific article published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. He therefore thought that he would drop by the Omnibus' offices to tell us about it.
Unfortunately, even for intellectual capacities in the Nobel class, it’s pretty much impossible to find out who has their office where nowadays. Skou never did find the editors and our office on Fuglesangs Allé, as he ended his search in one of the offices in the now defunct AU Communication on Fredrik Nielsens Vej.
Omnibus must therefore take comfort in the fact that we could have had a visit from someone of Jens Christian Skou’s calibre. The wording of an email from programme planner Hans Plauborg shows that we are not the only ones who don’t usually drink coffee with an almost 100-year-old researcher from among the exclusive club of recipients of the world's most prestigious scientific award:
"96-year-old Jens Chr. just dropped by the office as he wanted to get hold of the newspaper’s editor. Reason: he has just had an article accepted by a scientific journal. And as he said: ‘What is going on when the university forces its researchers to retire when they turn seventy!’ Perhaps it’s worth a notice in the paper in one way or another.
@Palle. I have the original serviette with Skou’s coffee stains for the archive (university historian Palle Lykke, red.).”
Translated by Peter Lambourne