TRlBllTE Thirty-Five Years of Liver Sinusoidal Cells: Eddie Wisse in Retirement rofessor Wisse, retiring after the 2002-2003 academic year, became head of the department of Cell P Biology and Histology at the Free University of Brussels (Belgium) in 1978 and has taught more than 2,000 (bio)medical students the finer points of cell biology. Students in his laboratory attest to his remarkable capacity to inspire, stimulate, and fascinate the mind about the quandaries of histology and hepatology in particular. In addition, he is also an extensive. He wrote and refined texts about all aspects of liver sinusoidal cells and published more than 120 articles in refereed journals. During the past three decades, he gave more than 250 international talks directly related to the ultrastructure of hepatic sinusoidal cells. The present letter briefly cites examples of his contribution to the liver sinusoidal field and to the international scientific scene. Eddie Wisse started his biology training at the State University of Leiden (The Netherlands) in 1956, and in 1974 he was awarded cum laude the Ph.D. with the thesis "On the structure and function of endothelial and Kupffer cells in rat liver" under the supervision of Prof.
Wiggele Th. Daems. In 1970 he published his first outstanding article about the discovery of fenestrae in the endothelial lining of rat liver sinusoids' (Fig. 1). This article has been cited more than 361 times since its appearance in Journal of Ultrastructure. Six years later he again surprised the liver sinusoidal community by his description of a new cell type that resides in the liver sinusoids for which he proposed the name pit cell2 (Fig. 2). A name derived from his Dutch roots. The word "pit" was introduced because of the characteristic cytoplasmic granules, which in Dutch language are called pit, resembling the pits in a grape. This cell type is nowadays known as the hepatic natural killer cell.
In 1977, together with Professor Dick L. Knook (Leiden University, The Netherlands), he launched the first International Kupffer Cell Symposium (Noorwij kerhout) which is nowadays a 25-year-old biannual fesr for "sinusoidologists." They made hepatologists aware that the liver is not solely made up of hepatocytes, and from that point onwards many researchers have confirmed the importance of sinusoidal cells in liver physiology and patho-Copyright 0 2003 by the American Association for the Stlldy ofLiver Diseases.