Wieslawa Agnieszka Fogel

The oration for Professor Fogel was given by one of our Honorary Members, Professor Wilfred Lorenz of Germany. Professor Lorenz first visited Lodz when Agnieszka’s late husband Czeslaw Maslinski organised the Satellite Symposium of the 25th International Congress of the Physiological Sciences in August 1971. This meeting was very important as the outcome of this symposium was the ‘Histamine Club’ with principal researchers in the histamine field being part of it. However it was clear that the delegates wanted to create their own new society which subsequently became our European Histamine Research Society which is celebrating its 42nd meeting again in Lodz. Counting the Histamine Club meeting, this current meeting makes the fourth time we have met in Lodz. Agnieszka’s first attendance at the EHRS was the London meeting in 1977 and she and her researchers have been constant participants at our meetings ever since.

Due to the high concentration of histaminologists in Poland, Czeslaw started the Polish Histamine Club. When the society became the Polish Histamine Research Society (1989), Agnieszka was one of the co-founders and acted as General Secretary 1989-1998 and was elected President in 1999. After receiving a prestigious fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation, Agnieszka was the Secretary of the Lodz District (1989-94) and President of the Lodz District/Region (1995-2003, 2010-now) and has been a Council Member of the Societas Humboldtiana Polonorum from 2003 to present day. In fact it was also apt for Wilfried Lorenz to give the oration as Agnieszka had spent her Humboldt fellowship in his laboratory. She has published in total about 100 full papers on histamine metabolism in relation to some clinical disturbances such as dementia and Parkinsonism. Thus Agnieszka has been associated with the EHRS for a long time and as she was the wife of the founder of the society, Czeslaw Maslinski, she can be thought as the ‘mother’ of the society and rightly deserves being elected an Honorary Member of the European Histamine Research Society.