Maurice Welsch
In 1971, Maurice Welsch was appointed to complete the term of office of Marcel Dubuisson who had resigned. He was subsequently re-elected for a full term. In the name of democratic openness, the 1971 law enlarged the Board of Directors. It also introduced an egalitarian distribution of higher education resources between public and private universities, based on student numbers, thus pitting universities against each other.
Maurice Welsch was born in Liège on December 20, 1910. He received his medical degree from the University of Liège in 1934. With masters such as Henri Fredericq for physiology and Désiré Damas for zoology, he had plenty to stimulate his ambitions as a researcher. But his preferred field was microbiology. In January 1935, he became an assistant in the bacteriology department of the renowned Institut provincial Ernest Malvoz, before joining Professor Gratia's bacteriology and parasitology department at the University of Liège the following academic year.
But even then, a research career abroad was a welcome way of consolidating the initial efforts of a young academic career. Maurice Welsch went to London's National Institute for medical research in 1937, and to the United States in 1939, notably to the Rockfeller Institute for medical research in Princeton.
A reserve officer, the war called him into the ranks of the Belgian Army Medical Corps, in Great Britain and on the Continent, depending on the progress of the Allies.
In 1945, he was appointed head of research at the University of Liège, and his career resumed its course. He became involved in the great pharmaceutical revolution underway: the use of antibiotics, which would have a considerable impact on improving people's health. He took advantage of American advances in this field to set up a research center for penicillin and other antibiotics in Liège, which was to become the Centre national pour la production et l'étude de substances d'origine microbienne (National Center for the Production and Study of Substances of Microbial Origin).
In 1950, he was appointed agrégé de faculté, the year of the death of his boss André Gratia, from whom he inherited the teaching of bacteriology and parasitology. In 1951, he was appointed lecturer and director of the general and medical microbiology laboratories at the Faculty of Medicine. He became full professor in 1954. In ten years, he had already made his mark on the University of Liège.
A member of the Royal Academy of Medicine, he was part of a vast scientific network, including director of the International Center for information on antibiotics from 1962, and president of the International Society of Chemotherapy from 1965 to 1971.
Several times dean of the Faculty of Medicine in the 1960s, he supported the construction of the University Hospital at Sart Tilman. He became Rector in 1971, a very special year in which two laws overturned the university landscape, one modifying governance within the Board of Directors of university institutions, and thus the powers of the Rector, and the other concerning university funding calculated according to the number of students enrolled. Welsch had to deal with the consequences of these innovations throughout his term of office, which lasted until 1977.
Maurice Welsch died on February 11, 1986.
