Obituary: Kuan-Teh Jeang
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OBITUARY
Open Access
Obituary: Kuan-Teh Jeang Ben Berkhout1*, Monsef Benkirane2, Andrew Lever3, Mark Wainberg4, Ariberto Fassati5, Persephone Borrow6, Masahiro Fujii7, Srimathy Sriskantharajah8 and Matthew Cockerill8 Dear colleagues, Our loyal friend Kuan-Teh Jeang, “Teh” to friends and colleagues, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 54 on the evening of January 27, 2013. Great shock and sorrow was apparent in the avalanche of email messages by the very many international colleagues with whom Teh interacted over the years. Many of us came to know Teh as an energetic and gifted scientist for whom we had much respect and affection. Teh (Figure 1) was born in 1958 in Taichung, Taiwan and was the youngest to his two older brothers. Teh spent his childhood in Libya and came to the US in 1970. At age 16, he began college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after two years, started medical school at Johns Hopkins University, receiving both his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees by age 25. His Ph.D. thesis was on the regulation of gene expression in cytomegalovirus with Dr. Gary S. Hayward as advisor. During his time at Hopkins, Teh met his wife, Diane, a graduate student in the same laboratory. They married in 1984 in Iowa, where Teh completed his medical internship. The next year, Teh started his post-doctoral work at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the laboratory of Dr. George Khoury at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Khoury died much too early at the age of 43 in 1987, but he was Teh’s role model and influenced him greatly in his professional life. As a recognition of his scientific achievements, Teh was recently selected to deliver the 2012 George Khoury Lecture at NIH on cellular transformation by the human T cell leukemia virus (HTLV-I). Teh had been working at the NIH in Bethesda for 27 years, exactly half of his life, and was chief of the Molecular Virology Section in the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology. His major research interest was around the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) and HTLV-I, with an abundant production of more than 300 scientific publications on the molecular details of virus replication * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Medical Microbiology, Laboratory of Experimental Virology, Center for Infection and Immunity Amsterdam (CINIMA), Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 15, 1105 AZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
and relevant disease-causing mechanisms of viral pathogenesis. Teh was a true experimentalist with an interest in the implementation of new technologies to get to the next level of understanding of the biology of human pathogenic viruses. He only stopped bench work in 2004 when he became editor-in-chief of Retrovirology. HTLV-1 is linked to the development of adult T-cell leukemia and a variety of inflammatory manifestations including HTLV-1 associated myelopathy. Teh was the first to show that HTLV-1 transcription is regulated through the cAMP sig
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