Dr George Casimir Malachowski died peacefully in mid-afternoon on Wednesday, June 12th, 2013 with his family at his bedside in the Melbourne Private Hospital. He'd been unwell for an extended time after hip-replacement surgery in late 2010. Last month, a bout of the flu became pneumonia and the infection finally won out after a two week epic battle at MPH.
He is mourned deeply by his wife Jan, nee Crowley, and her family and by his brother Stan, his wife Zita and his Dad, Kay. Not to mention all his good mates and Cytomates!!
I met George in 1982 when he returned to Melbourne from his post-doc at Cambridge University working for Dr Richard Keynes, Charles Darwin's grandson, later Sir Richard..
As a post-doctoral Fellow, George worked for Richard on the data analysis problem of linearising the fitting of data to multiple exponentials, a feat he achieved by introducing the Chebyshev Transform, in which initially the measured data set was expressed as a finite sum of discrete Chebyshev Polynomials across a finite domain.
This formalism was successful in linearising the fitting process for 1-, 2- and 3- exponential data sets, though George took a long time to publish this methodology. In effect, a data set could be fitted by a single set of calculations which did not require iterations nor guessed starting values - routinely a 100-fold gain in speed resulted, and the method was very robust in the presence of high noise-levels!!
Back then in 1982 he teamed up with Brian Hall, then a Professional Officer at the Ludwig Institute, to start LabSoft. This company [Laboratory Software Associates] was a specialist lab computer company that deployed DEC PDP-11 and LSI-11 computers for instrument control and data acquisition.
At Tony Burgess's Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the three of us developed the CICERO sorter control system, whose name reflected George's connection to Classical tradition. But CICERO was very much 'state-of-the art' late 20th century in its performance, and it changed the cell-sorter paradigm when it introduced 'single-drop' sorting envelopes, breaking with the 3-drop model then in vogue.
More innovation and invention followed when we three started Cytomation Inc [in 1988 with Bonnie Lievan as the fourth founder] and afterwards did a deal with the Lawrence Livermore Labs to produce a commercial lab-ready version of Ger van den Engh's original in-house cell-sorter, the MoFlo.
The MoFlo once commercialised, quite transformed sorting practices and launched our company into a new dimension of performance and utility.
George was a true intellectual, a man of great culture, and quite a linguist, but he had his ideosyncracies too, some of which may live on long in our memories, along with the serious and formidable body of work and studies that he left us. My favourite George saying was that it was not the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog that counted and those of us who watched his last years and now his last days play out, can attest to the amazing @#*##@ fight that he put up.
Vale George. Vas bien mon bel ami!! Rest in Peace.
There is a plan for the funeral on Tuesday 18th June and there's sure to be a wake
Bob Ashcroft, Sandringham, 13th June 2013.
9 Heath St Sandringham Vic 3191 Australia
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