Tribute to Olivier Hartmann

Tribute to Pierre May (1925-2009)
Pierre May, one of the discoverer of p53, left us in July 2009.
A meeting will be held in his honour this September in York.
He was an excellent scientist and also a very humane person. He was born in 1925 in Nancy,
France, where he lived until the beginning of the Second World War, when his family sought
refuge in the South-East of France.
In 1950, he graduated from the Ecole Nationale des
Industries Chimiques (ENSIC), a school affiliated to the Institut National Polytechnique de
Lorraine. He then began a scientific career at the Institut de la Recherche sur le Cancer (IRC) in
Villejuif, near Paris, and obtained a position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
(CNRS) in 1952. He was interested in Biophysics, Virology and Molecular Biology, but always
with the aim of understanding the mechanisms of oncogenesis. In the 1960s and the 1970s, he
stayed as a visiting scientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York, USA), at the
National Institute of Health (Bethesda, USA) and at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer
Research (ISREC) (Lausanne, Switzerland). He became Head of the Molecular Oncology
Laboratory at IRC in 1982.
From a scientific point of view, the major contributions of Pierre May have been in the p53
field.
First of all, his team discovered the p53 protein in 1979 (Kress et al., 1979),
simultaneously with two other English and American laboratories (DeLeo et al., 1979; Lane and
Crawford, 1979; Linzer and Levine, 1979). From that moment on, his laboratory provided
relevant information about p53 properties, notably by identifying five highly conserved domains
that highlighted specific p53 regions, as the famous DNA binding domain. Overall, his work
has largely contributed to a better understanding of wild-type p53 structure-function
relationship, which has been very useful for the scientific community working on p53.
Pierre May received several prestigious awards for his contribution to p53 discovery and
knowledge, such as an invitation to stay at NIH as Fogarty International Centre’s Scholar in
Residence (1985-1986), two prizes from the French Ligue Nationale Contre le Cancer (1992,
1993), the Rosen Prize of Cancer from the French Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (1993)
and the Léopold Griffuel Prize from the French Association pour la Recherche sur le Cancer
(1996).
He had three loves: Evelyne May, his wife and collaborator for a long time, Laurence, his
daughter, and his job. After he retired in 1994, he continued to participate to the laboratory’s
life as Emeritus Director until 2004. He was also a member of the Editorial Board of Oncogene
from its inception in 1987 until the middle of the 2000s.
We keep fond memories of a very humane person, modest, cultured and very popular with
colleagues and friends.
Reference List
DeLeo,A.B., Jay,G., Appella,E., Dubois,G.C., Law,L.W., and Old,L.J. (1979). Detection of a
transformation-related antigen in chemically induced sarcomas and other transformed cells of
the mouse. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A 76, 2420-2424.
Kress,M., May,E., Cassingena,R., and May,P. (1979). Simian virus 40-transformed cells express
new species of proteins precipitable by anti-simian virus 40 tumor serum. J. Virol. 31, 472-483.
Lane,D.P. and Crawford,L.V. (1979). T antigen is bound to a host protein in SV40-transformed
cells. Nature 278, 261-263.
Linzer,D.I. and Levine,A.J. (1979). Characterization of a 54K dalton cellular SV40 tumor
antigen present in SV40-transformed cells and uninfected embryonal carcinoma cells. Cell 17,
43-52.