Gunnar Blix and his discovery of sialic acids. Fascinating molecules in glycobiology

Gunnar Blix (Figure 1) was born in Lund in 1894. He was the son of a famous physiologist, Magnus Blix. After medical school, he started in research and defended his thesis entitled Studies on Diabetic Lipaemia in 1925 at the University of Lund. Previously he had been employed by the university as a research fellow in anatomy and medical chemistry, and for shorter periods of time he also practised as a physician. Directly after his dissertation he moved to Uppsala, where he obtained a position in 1926 as associate professor (laborator) and four years later succeeded Carl Thore Mörner as professor in Medical and Physiological Chemistry. This professorship had been created in 1853. Gunnar Blix held the professorship for 31 years (1930–1961). During the years 1956–1961 he also served as Deputy Vice Chancellor in the university administration. He was Editor-in-Chief for Acta Societatis Medicorum Upsaliensis (from 1972 Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences) between 1943 and 1969. After his retirement he continued to work until 1970 as executive member of the Swedish Foundation for Nutritional Research (Stiftelsen Svensk Näringsforskning). Gunnar Blix died on 10 June 1981 at the age of 87 years. Those who met and got to know Gunnar Blix remember him as an honest, dutiful, and humble person who generously gave of his ideas and devoted much of his time to teaching students in the medical school and graduate students in his research group. He became a highly worthy successor to his predecessors of the professorship (Table I, Figure 2). His time as professor coincided with an important period in the development of the scientific field of medical and physiological chemistry. He became internationally well known and a leading scientist within his own research field. Gunnar Blix enjoyed public confidence, and it was by no means accidental that he was assigned to numerous commissions of trust within his own faculty, within the university, and also nationally. He was a member of the organizing committees for the formation of both Gothenburg and Umeå Medical Schools in 1947 and 1958, respectively. In the case of Umeå, all existing universities in Sweden voted against the establishment of a medical school there. Blix, however, made a reservation against the negative attitude from Uppsala and thereby he succeeded in convincing the Swedish government to proceed with the plans, which later on led to the formation of Umeå University. The Faculty of Medicine in Uppsala initially became ‘mother faculty’ to the new medical faculties in both Gothenburg and Umeå and later on also in Linköping. When Blix became a member of the Faculty of Medicine in Uppsala, his department of medical chemistry was housed in an old building called ‘Gamla Kemikum’ (Old chemistry institute) located in Engelska parken (The English park). This building (Figure 3) was erected in 1853–1859 and in time became more and more worn out. The sanitary conditions, for instance, made it gradually impossible to continue to work there. The government therefore