In memory of Prof. Helena Ra ková, MD., DSc., Dr.h.c.

On April 13, 2010, Prof. Helena Ra ková, MD, DrSc., Dr.h.c., the legendary figure of Czecho-Slovak and world pharmacology, passed away. She was born in 1913 in Laussane in a physician's family of a Czech father and Russian mother. She was predestinated for science even due to her childhood experience and meetings with A. Einstein and the later Nobel prize winner W. Hess, who played in a chamber quartet with her father. Moreover, she became a polyglot from the earliest time of her life (Czech from her father, Russian from her mother), Switzerdeutsch and Hochdeutsch from nursary rhymes, French in the elementary school in Zurich and basic English in convent summer school in Weymouth, where as she put it "she got an early lesson that one loves one's own country but is also a citizen of the world".