Leon Wolfe's beginnings as a chemist go back to when he was a young lad in New Zealand working in his father's business - "Wolfe's All-Fruit Juices". His job was to carry out some simple chemical tests to make sure that the apple juice did not turn to cider and the carrot and other vegetable juices did not go sour. Eventually, at the peak of his career, Leon became a world authority on brain chemistry; his research centered on how certain chemical reactions in the nervous system go awry to cause neurological disease.

Between these two stages of his life, Leon took some pauses and some detours. As when he ran away from Missionary College in his mid-teens to end up a farmhand harvesting mangoes. Or his pursuit of the study of insects, over a decade or so, starting at Canterbury University with his MSc. thesis on the dragonfly. He then spent two years at Cambridge with Sir Vincent Wigglesworth, perhaps the most eminent entomologist at that time in England. For his Doctorate thesis Leon studied an insect species with the exotic name of Calliphora erythrocephalus, or "redhead". He published his findings on the pores in the cuticle of this "redhead" as three substantial papers in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science.

*Based on a tribute presented in the Birks Chapel, McGill University, January 16, 2002