DR Qasim Mehdi one of the finest scientists, a perfect gentleman and a person of fine literary taste is gone. It has been a great loss for Pakistan.

I met Dr Mehdi at Stanford University where, at that time, I was a Fulbright visiting scholar. Prof Taube (the Nobel Laureate) introduced us. We immediately became friends. His wife, a graduate of Oxford University in Philosophy, is also an extremely learned person.

We had a couple of get-togethers at Dr Mehdi`s home in California. Once he askedfor my opinion about his joining some research institute in Pakistan. I bluntly advised him against coming to Pakistan if he wanted to do excellent work. I am glad he did not accept my advice.

Next I met him in Islamabad. He had taken up the position of Director, Biomedical and Genetic Engineering Division, Dr A.Q.

Khan Research Laboratories.

In 1993, I, as Chairman of the Chemistry Department, Qaid-e-Azam University (QAU), had invited him to give a lecture in our 5th National Chemistry Conference. He obliged me and gave a multimedia-lecture on genome. Both the faculty and students were thrilled with his lecture. He was an excellent speaker.

He invited me to give a lecture for PYV-2 in 1995, so I gave one on free radicals.

It was a delight to listen to his scholarly lecture in 2005 in the Chemistry Department (of Karachi University) on its golden jubilee.

From an email of his last year, I learned that he was on chemotherapy. I knew what it meant: I was going to lose a worthy friend soon. I could only pray for his health.

The last e-mail I got from him was an exchange of New Year greetings.

Dr Mehdi was an institution by himself.

There will never be another like him for Pakistan.

Mahboob Mohammad Islamabad