Acta Protozoologica 2010 49/4
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
© Jagiellonian University
Acta Protozool. (2010) 49: 267–268
http://www.eko.uj.edu.pl/ap
Jiří Lom
(1931–2010)
The eminent Czech protozoologist and parasitologist Jiří Lom passed away on April 9, 2010 at the age of 78.
Lom studied under the tutelage of Otto Jírovec, the founding father of the Czech School of Parasitology. Jírovec
offered his students a professionally rigorous yet humanly liberal education (quite exceptional at that time in
the country which was under the the grip of the “socialist regime”!), under which gifted students like Jiří Lom
prospered.
Jiří Lom was a true lover of protists. He is remembered by his colleagues as a man who spent hours and hours
looking into his microscope, made skilled drawings for his publications and who was an excellent photographer,
both in science and art. He was especially fascinated by ciliates and ciliates remained his life-long love. He studied
them for his master’s and Ph.D. thesis (1954 and 1958, respectively), later in 1966 he won for his contribution to
ciliatology the informal yet prestigious “Ciliate Cravatte Award” from the Society of Protozoology and in 1994
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268 Jiří Lom
wrote a monumental chapter on peritrichous ciliates for the Grasse’s Traite de Zoologie. After successfully defending his master thesis in 1954, Lom became the first scientist Jírovec hired for his newly formed Protozoology
Laboratory at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The laboratory, like all scientific laboratories in Czechoslovakia at that time, was fully funded by the state. The modest yet constant infusion of state money allowed the
scientists to concentrate fully on research and led to the formation of a generation of young scientists with a wide
range of knowledge in their respective disciplines. Jiří Lom flourished in the exceptionally liberal environment of
Jírovec’s laboratory, accumulated a huge and broad body of knowledge about protists and published at that time
papers on so vastly different protists as ciliates, microsporidia and parasitic flagellates.
Two events occurred in the next few years that deeply influenced Jiří’s future scientific career. In 1961, Jiří was
one of the main organizers of the First International Conference on Protozoology, presided by Jírovec and sponsored
by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Despite being held during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, at the height of the
Cold War, the conference was a great success and created the tradition of protozoology conferences held since every
four years. The conference stimulated several cooperative projects between Czech protozoologists and their foreign
colleagues. Jiří Lom established many life-long partnerships at the conference and, aided by the fact that he was
fluent in five languages, started on a path that would propel him into prominence within the international scientific
community. He became an active and life-long member of several international societies including the International
Society of Protozoologists (serving as the vice-president in 1968–1969 and again in 1979–1980), Groupment des
Protistologues de la Langue Française, American Society of Parasitologists and the European Society of Fish Pathologists and served on Editorial Boards of several international protozoology journals sponsored by these societies (Acta Protozoologica, among them). Jiří Lom’s publication history demonstrates the merits of his international
cooperation: of the 236 papers in his bibliography, over half include one or more foreign co-authors.
In 1962, Jírovec’s protozoology laboratory merged with the Institute of Parasitology at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Jiří began to focus his attention on the study of parasitic protozoa of fish and devoted the rest
of his research career to this area. His main interest was in the morphology, life cycles, taxonomy, phylogeny and
pathogenicity of these organisms. Jiří Lom also pioneered the investigatation of several protist groups (mainly
myxozoa and microsporidia) using electron microscopy.
After 1965, the tight ideological grip of the socialist regime in the former Czechoslovakia slackened enough to
allow scientists to travel more to the West. Jiří was invited to visit many leading protozoology laboratories worldwide. Just a few of them can be mentioned here: he worked and published with Pierre de Puytorac at the University
of Clermont-Ferrand in France and spent two years as a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois- Chicago with
J. O. Corliss. He also gained first-hand experience with the protozoan parasites of marine fishes while on scientific
expeditions on the Great Banks during a stay with Marshall Laird at Memorial University in Newfounland, Canada.
In 1985, Jiří Lom moved with the Institute of Parasitology to the academic campus in Southern Bohemia in
České Budějovice, Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia). The town of České Budějovice (also known in German
as Budweis), situated in a large basin with many freshwater lakes and fishponds, has a long tradition of fisheries
and represents a fertile ground for fish parasitology research. Here, within the Institute of Parasitology, Jiří Lom
created a laboratory devoted to the study of protistan fish diseases. He headed the laboratory until 1999, and remained on the staff until his death. Here, he produced many important papers synthesizing knowledge of various
groups of fish parasites (e.g. myxozoa and microsporidia), in cooperation with Prof. Iva Dykova wrote several
book chapters and monographs on fish protozoan parasites and authored a book on the microsporidia of vertebrates
with E. U. Canning. Two importants conferences on fish parasitology in České Budějovice were also organized by
Jiří Lom. The laboratory at the Institute of Parasitology and his published works will forever remain as a lasting
tribute to Jiří Lom, the man who truly loved studying protists and studied them so well. Further information on Jiří
Lom’s achievements and his complete bibliography can be found in Folia Parasitologica Vol. 53, pp. 317–318,
2006 and Vol. 57, p. 156, 2010. Jiří Lom also appears in the gallery of the world’s leading protozoologists (see
Corliss J. O. 1998. J. Euk. Microbiol. 45, 1–26).
Jiří Vávra, Biology Centre, Institute of Parasitology, Academy of Sciences and Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, České
Budějovice, Czech Republic.
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