In memoriam lecturer Hans Albert Bøye Ph.D. (Cantab.) by professor emeritus Anthony Carter

n>After completing his master’s degree (cand. scient.), Bøye went to Cambridge, where he was a research scholar at King’s College and graduate student at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

His supervisor was Nobel laureate Francis Crick. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 with a thesis on “Studies in protein synthesis.” Here he showed how messenger RNA associates with ribosomes, which is an essential step in the translation of the genetic code to proteins. During his time in Cambridge, Bøye also published with Sydney Brenner, a future Nobel laureate. Bøye was thus a firsthand witness to many of the important discoveries that form the foundation for today’s comprehensive research in molecular biology. >

Bøye was an amateur photographer and is regarded as a significant documentarist. Bøye’s iconic photo of “The Hut,” the temporary building that housed four Nobel laureates, has been reproduced many times. He made unique film and video recordings of Crick and others in 1962 when the latter, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for work on the structure of DNA. >

>Hans Bøye was for many years a lecturer in cytology at the Winsløw Institute of Human Anatomy, University of Southern Denmark. At Odense, Bøye’s research interests included chromosome banding. He was technically gifted and worked with electron microcopy, including freeze fracture to study ribosome structure by scanning electron microcopy. Bøye’s interest in photography continued into the digital era. With lecturer John Chemnitz, he made digital photographs of all the bones in the human skeleton; material still in use on various digital teaching platforms.

Hans Albert Bøye died at the age of 87 on 29 November 2024. May he rest in peace.

Hans Bøye’s film from the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology “Excitement in Science” was digitalized in 2022 and can be viewed at: