Pepeljnjak Stjepan: Mikrobi u stihu i pjesmi / Microbes in Poetry and Songs

Stjepan Pepeljnjak: Microbes in Poetry and Songs

The world of microbes is rarely interpreted poetically, although its reality is described in different ways in literature. From the writer's pen and through artistic images from the history of the discovery of microbes, we sense their existence in the time before the documentation affirmed them as a biological reality. Thanks to the boldness of the pictorial documentation, which sprung from their imagination, today we see that they closely represented the forms of microbes and the secrets of their life.

Given that poetry itself, as an interpretation of the experience of various life sensations, expresses "wonder at the world" in a special way, the attempt to poetically experience the reality of the world of microbes is a certain freedom that speaks in a special way about the mysterious integrity or totality of reality. of life.

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Prof. Ph.D. Stjepan Pepeljnjak was born on January 2, 1944 in Zagreb, where he completed elementary and high school. He graduated in 1970 from the Veterinary Faculty of the University of Zagreb. At the same faculty, he obtained his master's degree in 1974 in the field of microbiology and epizootiology, and in 1977 he completed his pedagogical training at the Faculty of Philosophy. He received his doctorate in the field of mycotoxicology at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in 1980. At the Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry (FBF) of the University of Zagreb, he was elected as an assistant in 1971, and as an assistant professor in 1981. He obtained the title of scientific advisor in 1986, when he was also elected as a full professor at the FBF, and in 1999 as a full professor with a permanent position. He is the founder of the Department of Microbiology of the FBF, for which he built two premises (Kneza Mislava 11 and Schrottova 39), whose head he was until his retirement in 2009. 

He is the recipient of the Medal of Honor (American Biographical Institute 2000), the City of Zagreb Award for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in 2003, and the State Award for the Popularization of Science in the Field of Biomedical Sciences, especially Toxicology and Microbiology (2004). He is the president of the Mycological Section of the Croatian Microbiological Society (HMD) and the College of Pharmacy of the Croatian Academy of Medical Sciences (AMZH, 2010). He has been a member of AMZH since 2008. He is a member of several domestic professional associations, as well as the New York Academy of Sciences and ISHAM (International Society of Human and Animal Mycology).