Our friend Dr. Henk Janssen (director of SyMO-Chem), who was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in October 2022, was a big fan of this alternative music scene. I had bought tickets to a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Rotterdam. Unfortunately, Henk’s condition deteriorated in late June so we had to pass up on the concert. Henk passed away on October 21, 2024. The frontman of Henk’s favorite band reacted to his death as follows: “Sad day for his family and friends and a world that still needs his discipline and science but a great welcome in heaven!”

Like the music movement of the early 1990s, Henk rose up out of nowhere unexpectedly. He was the youngest of ten children in a farming family from Meijel and had a modest upbringing. “Henk was a very good student,” shared one of Henk’s sisters at his funeral. “He was a simple man with a brilliant mind,” she continued. That he would go on to become a brilliant chemist – the mastermind behind the technology and intellectual property of biotech startups, among other things – was not something his family could have foreseen.

Like the music movement of the early 1990s (and unlike all the top-down trash like Milli Vanilli), Henk’s work is long-lasting. For example, Henk helped develop a whole new form of immunotherapy. ‘Could that work against my glioblastoma?’ he asked me a year ago. ‘Conceptually, yes,’ I answered.  ‘Good, I hope it will benefit future patients,’ Henk responded.

Henk and “his” SyMO-Chem are bottom-up gems that emerged during a time when administrators were not yet trying to implement all sorts of ill-conceived (and often completely unworkable) policies from the top down through an entirely out-of-control bureaucracy. It was a time when the talent and experience of impressive, highly-skilled professionals were paramount. And fortunately, there is still room for that at TU/e. Our esteemed fellow chemist and professor Patricia Dankers will ensure that SyMO-Chem and its staff have a bright future.

I’m incredibly grateful that I’ve had the privilege of working and becoming friends with Henk over the past twenty years. In the last five years, Henk and I collaborated intensely. And over the past few months, I regularly treated Henk to freshly smoked salmon. It was even his last meal. I still get the “Henk & Willem hour” calendar notification every Friday at 11 AM. And I’m not going to delete it any time soon.

The picture was taken by Leonie Voets.