Death of a Scientist, the Type of People We Are Losing to Covid.
Last edited Wed May 6, 2020, 10:26 AM - Edit history (1)
In connection with my work, I'm on the mailing list of many companies, many with which I do not actually work.
Yesterday I received in my email the announcement of the loss of a Chief Scientific Officer at a company called Pion, Inc., a company working in robotic scientific instrumentation. (I have never worked with them, since I'm involved in other areas) It struck me as sad and moving - as I am dealing with a similar loss in my own company - as here is a person who came to the United States as an immigrant and worked to make our country great, until its greatness was severely damaged by incompetence, lying and ignorance at the highest levels of government.
He was, perhaps, not a super famous scientist, but he was a solid and highly productive scientist who brought his skills to a great country that is bleeding its greatness. These are the people who have built our country; these are the people who make it work.
Some excerpts of his company's release:
...Konstantin joined Pion in 1998 (earliest photo of him on the left), just as the seedling company was starting to expand, poised to develop innovative scientific equipment for pharmaceutical research. The start-up secured its first external funds from a prominent pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, in exchange for the promise of delivery of the first “PAMPA” instruments (Parallel Artificial Membrane Permeability Assay). We had been working behind the scenes with Dr. Manfred Kansy of Roche (Basel), the inventor of PAMPA, for the preceding two years, before his famous seminal paper was published in 1998. So, that year we took the investment we secured and spent the whole lot on (i) a lease to a modest space on the second floor of a two-story industrial building, above Mike’s Gym, on the outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts, (ii) a Tecan robot workstation (pictured above – which several of us carried up the rickety wooden staircase in the elevatorless building), (iii) hiring a laboratory scientist (who later went on to medical school to become a physician), and (iv) hiring a scientific programmer – Konstantin. He was a PhD physicist interested in robotics programming, with a ‘can do just about anything’ attitude. He received his advanced degrees from the Institute of Metal Physics and the Dnepropetrovsk State University in Ukraine. He and his family had just then emigrated to America...
...Konstantin was the principal developer of the high throughput permeability analyzer and subsequently the high-throughput method for measuring solubility-pH profiles. He continued investigating physicochemical factors influencing intestinal absorption and penetration across the blood-brain-barrier of pharma research molecules, expanding the scope of applications for the UV fiber-optic technique. A long-standing challenge in drug dissolution measurement concerned assessment of multicomponent active pharmaceutical ingredients in exploratory formulations. He developed the so-called “ZIM” technique to crack the challenge. Its later applications to studying nanoparticle suspensions were groundbreaking. It was such a clever idea that allowed the implementation of UV-Vis spectroscopy for real time concentration monitoring of complex phenomena...
...Konstantin was more than a laboratory researcher. He jumped right in to participate and lead in user training programs...
The full announcement is here: In memoriam Konstantin Tsinman (1968 - 2020)
With his family:
The caption:
It makes you want to weep, even not knowing the man at all.
We are all losers in losing citizens like these and that child at the essentially abandoned helm of our country in one of its worst storms ever, muttering "loser" at everyone, as if his small mind and his grotesque failures, has made us all losers.
= new reply since forum marked as read
