Dr. Helmut Blum (February 27, 1960 – August 29, 2025)

It is with great sadness that we received the news of the death of our esteemed colleague and good friend, Dr. Helmut Blum. With his profound knowledge of biochemistry, his outstanding analytical skills, his great helpfulness, his perseverance, and, last but not least, his special sense of humor, he held a key position at the Gene Center for over three decades.
After studying chemistry and obtaining his doctorate at the University of Würzburg, he joined Horst Domdey's research group at the Gene Center, which was then still located at the Max Planck Institute, as a postdoctoral fellow in 1989. In addition to his scientific work, he was heavily involved in the planning of the Gene Center's new building, which was completed in 1994. Since then, Helmut Blum has been the central contact person for questions relating to building infrastructure and security. After his appointment as Academic Councilor (1997), he was a working group leader at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology - Gene Center from 1998 to 2003.

A significant step in his professional development was the establishment of the Laboratory for Functional Genome Analysis (LAFUGA) at the Gene Center, where he went on to head the Genomics Department as Senior Academic Advisor (2005) and Academic Director (2009). As part of DFG research groups, he played a key role in the discovery of mechanisms of embryo-maternal communication and other phenomena in reproductive biology. Thanks to his outstanding knowledge in the field of nucleic acid analysis, he developed LAFUGA's Genomics Department into a central research and service platform whose user base extended far beyond the Gene Center. Helmut Blum's work made numerous projects possible that required special adaptations and developments of technologies. Helmut Blum was always available for this. The greater the challenge, the more he enjoyed it. It didn't matter to him whether he was helping with a small exploratory project, a special research area, or a large-scale strategic project in coronavirus research. He was always on board with the same enthusiasm, professional competence, and conceptual creativity. In this way, he made possible a large number of projects and publications in various fields that would not have been feasible without his contribution. As a result, Helmut Blum contributed to over 170 publications, some of them in very prestigious journals.

The high efficiency of his group was due to Helmut Blum's very special management style, which demanded a high degree of personal responsibility but was also extremely caring in all matters. Despite the almost hopeless diagnosis, he hoped for a long time that he would be able to overcome his serious illness. That is why he came to the laboratory almost every day, as long as he could, to be available to his employees and cooperation partners.

We are very grateful that we were able to spend a large part of our professional lives with Helmut Blum. He liked to describe himself as a technology developer, but his work went far beyond that. We will miss Helmut Blum greatly as a scientist, a personality, and a friend. Our thoughts are with his family, and we will not forget him.

Eckhard Wolf, Georg J. Arnold, Thomas Fröhlich, Stefan Krebs
Munich, September 1st 2025