Folia Biologica
Journal of Cellular and Molecular Biology, Charles University 

It is my great personal pleasure to dedicate this issue of Folia Biologica to Jan Svoboda. In spite of his 70lh birthday he has not changed very much and I still keep in fresh memory my coming to his laboratory in the early sixties. I remember his sharp intellect and good relations with his collaborators. At that time, being less than thirty, he already was a leading personality in the Czechoslovak retrovirological, biological and genetic scientific community, original-minded, friendly, and helpful to his younger colleagues. It greatly impressed his younger collaborators and students when he published in Nature in 1960 the method for rescue of Rous sarcoma virus from mammalian virogenic RSV-induced sarcoma by association with the avian permissive cells. And it was even more impressive that several decades later, the same strategy that Jan had used for the rescue of RSV from his XC rat sarcoma was successfully utilized for similar purposes by one of his Scholars and Friends, Miťa Popovič, for rescuing HIV. At the end of the sixties, Jan Svoboda worked as a Research Fellow in ICRF, London; in 1980 as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Institut Pasteur, Lille, France; during the eighties and early nineties in the United States as a Visiting Research Professor at UCLA, Los Angeles, in the Department of Microbiology, University of Missouri-Columbia, and in the Department of Microbiology, University of Minnesota. During this period he also served as a Founding Member, ETVG, Consultant in Immunology, WHO in Geneva, Member of the Committee for Virology and Immunology, UICC, and later as an Executive Committee Member, EACR. Jan Svoboda published more than 200 scientific papers. Two of the papers were selected by the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, as Citation Classics. For his basic contributions to the development of biology, genetics and virology, Jan Svoboda received G. Mendel Silver Medal in Prague in 1984, he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1989 and a Member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic in 1994, as well as a Member of the Award Committee, General Motors Cancer Research Foundation in 1987 and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1995. Jan Svoboda received three prestigious awards: Jane Coffin Child Memorial Award in 1967, Czechoslovak State Prize in Science, 1980, and Prix Lacassagne, La Ligue Francaise contre le Cancer, 1981. He is a member of many international scientific societies and editorial boards of scientific journals and still has a vast variety of educational activities at Charles University, Prague. For decades I have been staying in close scientific and personal touch with Jan Svoboda. During his eight-year term as Director of the Institute I was aiding as his Deputy Director and I really admired his diplomatic and still straightforward strategy, which helped the Institute of Molecular Genetics in Prague to overcome the difficult period after the end of “dark ages” in 1990. I take this opportunity to wish you, Jan, good health and further great success in all your scientific and educational activities.

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