‘Put anything you want in me’ said Space to Time, ‘and you'll see.’
July 29, 2014 4:33 AM   Subscribe

Leo Vroman, a Dutch scientist, artist and poet who lived in the US for many years, died in February of this year. Elsevier Connect did a great article back in 2012. It's rare that we see people who are great poets as well as passionate scientists. Leo Vroman was both; he needed more than just one outlet for an exceedingly curious and creative mind. His was an extraordinary life; he was a survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, who managed to be reunited with his fiancée Tineke after the war. They married and remained together until his last day.

In the US, Vroman worked as a researcher at various institutes, including the American Museum of Natural History, The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, the US Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Brooklyn, and Columbia University. While at Mount Sinai, he conducted research that enabled him to receive his PhD in physiology from Utrecht University.

His discovery, known as the Vroman Effect, describes the specific succession of blood proteins as they move along surfaces — research that provided new insight into blood. The work has influenced research in biomaterials, blood physiology and enzymology.

To the Dutch audience, Vroman is mainly known as a poet. You can read seven of his poems here.
posted by Too-Ticky (2 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Here's a link to a PDF that contains three more. Including one about his homeland, that's not very complimentary. I like that one, myself.
posted by Too-Ticky at 5:48 AM on July 29, 2014


An extraordinary life is an understatement! I'd never heard of him before--thank you for posting this.

I especially loved this bit from the Mokeham link: "His use of the Dutch language was playful and vibrant and he coined many new words. He speculated that his linguistic isolation – he only spoke Dutch with Tineke – laid the root for this phenomenon."
posted by mixedmetaphors at 4:31 PM on August 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


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