It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of our colleague, Myer Bloom. After a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, Myer passed away peacefully on Tuesday morning, February 9. The day before, he was able to enjoy an outing at the Van Dusen Gardens with his friends Christina Kaiser and Walter Hardy.
Myer was a graduate student of Charles Slichter and he inherited the spin echo apparatus made famous by Erwin Hahn. He is known for his fundamental contributions to NMR physics and to the applications of NMR to probe the structure and dynamics of biological membranes. Some of his best-known contributions were in defining the proton and deuteron NMR lineshapes from hydrogen nuclei in lipid hydrocarbon chains in both large multi-lamellar preparations and in smaller lipid vesicles as well as in the presence of membrane proteins. He created the ‘dePakeing’ technique which enables the extraction of single orientation deuteron NMR spectra from powder pattern spectra obtained from lipid hydrocarbon chains.
Myer Bloom will be missed by a very large community of scientists from all over the world who have taken advantage of his vast and deep understanding of NMR.
Alex MacKay, University of British Columbia