Roland Nardone, a longtime professor at Catholic University of America who was one of the loudest voices in speaking out against cell-line contamination, died June 20. He was 90 years old.
Nardone spent more than 50 years at Catholic University, and in the later part of his career he advocated for best practices in authenticating cell lines and avoiding contamination and misidentification in tissue cultures. A founding member of the International Cell Line Authentication Committee, Nardone saw the National Institutes of Health adopt guidelines in 2016 for authentication protocols that reflected those he and his collaborators had pushed for.
“That was a gigantic service to science that probably was his biggest contribution,” says John Golin, a professor at Catholic University who had been hired by Nardone in the 1980s.
Nardone was born in New York and was a precocious student, having finished his PhD at Fordham University in 1951 at ...
