Andreas Oksche In honour of his ninetieth birthday

Andreas Oksche Coordinating Editor of Cell & Tissue Research from 1978 to 1995, and Co-Editor for the section “Neuroendocrinology” for many years, will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on 27 July 2016. We, the Editors, Springer Nature Publishing Group, and many friends and former colleagues congratulate him on this occasion and wish him health and vitality for the years to come. Andreas Oksche is known as an eminent figure in neuroendocrinology with a world-wide reputation, as a leading anatomist in Germany and beyond and as a prominent personality in national science policy. He was born in Riga, Latvia, and received his training in anatomy and neuroscience at the University of Marburg under the guidance of Professors Benninghoff and Niessing. His MD thesis on the “Organon frontale” of the grass frog established the foundation of his successful career in neuroendocrinology. Andreas Oksche’s Habilitation addressed secretory features of glia, with special reference to the subcommissural organ, thereby expanding the list of cells with a secretory capacity in the brain and anticipating the functions of astroglia, which have only recently been analysed in detail. Following postdoctoral work with Ernst and Berta Scharrer, two prominent pioneers in neuroendocrinology and hypothalamic-pituitary neurosecretion, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he moved to the University of Kiel, where, in the late 1940s, Wolfgang Bargmann had established a centre for research on hypothalamic neurosecretion. The concept of neurons having a secretory identity had been initially met with profound scepticism. Proceeding from the hypothalamus to the pineal gland and circumventricular organs, Andreas Oksche’s contributions were essential to the broadening of the perception of the brain as having secretory capacities and of the neural–endocrine hybrid character of neurons. The discovery that such neuroendocrine cells could simultaneously act as photoreceptors and the elucidation of their fine structure was the culmination of the search for mechanisms underlying the regulation of Andreas Oksche (by courtesy of Dr. Alexander Oksche)