Professor Morten Møller (1942-2025)

It is with sadness I announce that my long-term mentor, colleague, and dear friend Professor Morten Møller has passed away on July 16th. This sadly marks the end of a scientific career which has spanned six decades.

Morten graduated as a medical doctor from University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1969 and after a few years in the US, he returned to the University of Copenhagen. Morten received tenure in 1976 and was promoted to full professor of neuroanatomy in 1994. Morten served as chairman for the Danish Society for Neuroscience (1992-1995), and most importantly, he subsequently served as president of the European Biological Rhythm Society (1996-2002).

                  Morten was an extraordinary electron microscopist. His initial work focused on development of the human pineal gland. Morten identified a central innervation of the pineal gland directly from the brain, and those of you who still believe that we only have twelve paired cranial nerves should read his paper on cranial nerve number fifteen (Møller, 1978, Brain Res). Morten went on to demonstrate non-sympathetic fibres innervating the pineal gland directly from the brain across species, but his early papers on this central innervation apparently received harsh reviews. On multiple occasions, and especially when we were struggling to get our papers accepted, Morten would laugh and remind me of the following (rather short) evaluation which he received in the late 1970’ies (Morten’s quotation): ‘Besides being written in very poor English, the few fibres demonstrated by Dr. Moller have absolutely no functional relevance and should not be published’.  The human nervus pinealis subsequently ended up in the esteemed reference textbook Gray’s Anatomy. Morten’s work was throughout his career focused on neural connections of the diencephalon regulating 24h circadian rhythms. Within this field, Morten supervised a number of young scientists who later ended up running their own independent research programs. During his emeritus years, Morten returned to electron microscopy of the pineal gland now extended with high-resolution 3-dimensional analyses (Møller et al., 2024, Neuroendocrinology).

                  Morten was an excellent teacher, and I clearly remember his inspiring lectures in neuroanatomy from the late 1990’ies. I later had the pleasure of writing a textbook (Anatomy of the Central Nervous System, 2020) and teaching a highly popular PhD course in neuroanatomy with him - he still got astonishing student reviews in 2023.

We shall all miss his scientific insights, old-fashioned humour and thoughtful critical comments on new data in the lab.