Guest post by Pooja Aggarwal
Publisher, Academic Journals, Nature Publishing Group.
“One of NPG’s longest-serving and most dedicated academic editors.”
It was with great sadness and shock that I learnt of the death of Dr Nicole Muller-Bérat Killman, Editor-in-Chief for our journal Leukemia. Nicole died on February 23rd 2014 at the age of 82.
Few people know of Nicole’s clinical contributions to the field of leukemia. She performed one of the early HLA-haplotype mis-matched bone marrow transplants for severe combined immune deficiency (1978) and an early description of acute lymphoblastic leukemia with t(4;11).
Nicole along with her husband, Sven-Aage, made a formidable duo working together in the laboratory to unravel the biology of acute leukemias and related disorders. They spent three years with Prof. Eugene Cronkite and colleagues at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US. Tritiated thymidine had just been discovered as a technique to label dividing cells and following their fate, Nicole and Sven-Aage were able to study the lifespan of hematopoietic cells in the laboratory and in humans. Their reports on this subject are classics.
Next they returned to Denmark where Nicole worked in the State Serum Institute in Copenhagen as leader of the leukemia and transplantation laboratories. Her main research interest was the use of in-vitro cultures of normal and leukemia cells to study biological questions, but she also collaborated with her husband on leukemia diagnosis.
In 1987, Nicole and Sven-Aage founded the journal Leukemia. After Sven’s death Nicole returned to Paris (which she loved) to became Editor-in-Chief. She tackled the job with great vigour, sometimes to the dismay of many authors and reviewers. Nicole dedicated her life to Leukemia running what might be best termed a one woman show out of her Paris flat.