Oleg Jardetzky
Feb. 11, 1929-Jan. 10, 2016
Stanford, California
Dr. Oleg Jardetzky passed away peacefully at his home on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016, at the age of 86. Oleg was a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine for over 40 years. He was the founder and director of the Stanford Magnetic Resonance Laboratory (SMRL), where he led pioneering biological research using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.
Oleg was born Feb. 11, 1929, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, into a family of Russian émigrés. His father, Wenceslas S. Jardetzky, was a well-known geophysicist and authority on celestial mechanics. His mother, Tatiana, nee Taranovski, was a professor of French, Russian, German and comparative literature. Oleg's early education was in Russian and German schools in Yugoslavia and Austria. In 1947, he graduated from secondary school in Graz, Austria, and then finished two years of medical school at the University of Graz. In 1949, he received a scholarship to Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, prompting him to move to the United States. He graduated from Macalester in 1950 with majors in chemistry and biology. He went on to obtain his M.D. degree in 1954 and his Ph.D. in 1956 from the University of Minnesota. Oleg spent the following year in Pasadena as a National Research Council Fellow at Caltech. During these years, Oleg had the good fortune of working closely with two Nobel Laureates (Bill Lipscomb and Linus Pauling), who he admired greatly and who remained inspirational friends throughout their lives.
In 1957, Oleg was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Pharmacology. There he founded the first Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) laboratory dedicated to biological research and laid a foundation for much future research in this field. In 1967, Oleg moved to Merck, Sharp, and Dohme Laboratories, where he served first as director of the Department of Biophysics, then as executive director of the Merck Institute. But Oleg loved the academic freedom to explore scientific questions independently, and in 1969 he moved to California to join the faculty at Stanford University School of Medicine as a professor of pharmacology (since 2006, chemical and systems biology). He founded and acted as director of the Stanford Magnetic Resonance Laboratory (SMRL) for the years 1972 to 1997. Oleg's research contributions and scholarship are widely recognized and honored. He retired and closed his laboratory in 2006, but continued to attend seminars and departmental functions at Stanford, and to publish, mostly historical articles, on the early history of NMR and on the Russian emigration after the revolution of 1917.
Oleg married his first wife, Christine Drakakis, in 1952 with whom he shared three children, Alexander (born 1957), Theodore (born 1960) and Paul (born 1963). In 1964, he married Norma Gene Wade, and in 1975 he married his third wife, Erika Albensberg, who had been a close friend in high school and college during his early years in Austria. Erika and Oleg spent many happy years together traveling the world, making sure to spend time in Erika's home village of Breitenfeld an der Rittschein (Austria), while visiting their close childhood friends in Graz. Oleg also loved the ocean and in particular the South Shore of Massachusetts, where he took his family to spend summers at a beach house which he visited as often as possible. This house and shoreline remained an especially important spiritual and symbolic place to him throughout his life. Oleg enjoyed many things over the years, exploring different cultures of the world, voicing his opinions, celebrating his family's Russian traditions, smoking his pipe, listening to classical music, painting, dabbling in ceramics and collecting historical books of significance.
Oleg was at heart a passionate academic scholar forever in pursuit of rigorous truths based on unequivocal facts and observations. Having mastered natural science and fluent in Russian, German and English, Oleg continued linguistic studies in Polish and pursued a lifelong interest in the origins of his own family. For many decades, Oleg visited libraries and other historical archives throughout Western and Eastern Europe to assemble a large collection of historical documents in order to build a comprehensive family tree extending back to the eighth century. Oleg published several articles in genealogical journals and two books on his family history. The first of these books, on the history of the Polish clan Ciolek, published in 1991, received a prize of the International Union of Heraldry and Genealogy in 1998.
Oleg lived his life with singular intensity, but he also had a generous and just heart and sense of humor that deeply touched many people throughout the years. He will be missed by many, but especially by his immediate family, the families of his close cousins, Vida Johnson and Ted Taranovski, and Nadia and Sergei Kormshchikov, who lived with him and cared for him for the past 12 years. Oleg is survived by three sons, Alexander (Los Gatos, California), Theodore (San Jose, California) and Paul (San Francisco, California) and their wives (Adrienne, Gayatri and Laurel), as well as four grandchildren (Andrew, Christina, Maxwell and Katrin) and two step-grandchildren (Stefan and Sofia).
Tags: teacher/educator
