Mourning for Harald zur Hausen
05/31/2023Harald zur Hausen, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and alumnus of the University of Würzburg, passed away on Sunday, 28 May 2023, at the age of 87. He conducted research in Würzburg from 1969 to 1972.
The discovery that viruses can cause cancer earned him the Nobel Prize for Medicine. In 2008, the Nobel Committee awarded Harald zur Hausen this honour. The physician had discovered that cervical cancer is caused by a viral infection. A discovery whose roots reach back to Würzburg: From 1969 to 1972, zur Hausen had conducted research at the local Institute of Virology at the University of Würzburg and worked on his habilitation. During this time, he demonstrated for the first time that the genetic material of the Epstein-Barr virus is present in certain human cancer tumours.
Almost ten years later, in 1983, zur Hausen discovered the virus responsible for cervical cancer, the so-called human papilloma virus (HPV). A vaccine is now on the market that offers "almost 100 per cent protection", as the scientist said in a lecture he gave at the University of Würzburg in 2012 at the invitation of the Würzburg Physico-Medica Society. At the Biozentrum colloquium, he spoke about infections as triggers of cancer.
Harald zur Hausen was born in Gelsenkirchen in 1936. After leaving school, he studied medicine at the universities of Bonn, Hamburg and Düsseldorf. He was awarded his doctorate in Düsseldorf in 1960. In 1966, Harald zur Hausen moved to the "Virus Laboratories" at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. There, his scientific interest was focussed on the connection between viral infections and cancer. At the end of the 1960s, he returned to Germany to complete his habilitation at the University of Würzburg. In 1972, he accepted an appointment at the University of Erlangen, where he became the founding director of the Institute of Virology.
Further stations in his career were the University of Freiburg and, from 1983, the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg. It was there that Harald zur Hausen discovered carcinogenic HPV types in cervical cancer samples. Here, the virologist was able to clarify how cells infected with HPV degenerate into cancer, thus laying the foundations for the vaccine against cervical cancer.
