Harald Zur Hausen - Biography

Biography

Zur Hausen was born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, went to the Gymnasium in Vechta, and studied medicine at the Universities of Bonn, Hamburg and Düsseldorf and received a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1960 from the University of Düsseldorf, after which he became a medical assistant.

Two years later, he joined the Institute for Microbiology at the University of Düsseldorf as a laboratory assistant. After three and a half years, he moved to Philadelphia and worked at the Virus Laboratories of the Children's Hospital together with the famous husband and wife virologists, Werner and Gertrude Henle, who had to escape from Nazi Germany. In a ground-breaking study, he contributed to finding for the first time that a cancer virus (Epstein-Barr virus) can transform healthy cells (lymphocytes) into cancer cells . This directly showed that viruses can cause cancer cell formation. He became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1969, he became a regular teaching and researching professor at the University of Würzburg, where he worked at the Institute for Virology. In 1972, he moved to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In 1977, he moved on to the University of Freiburg (Breisgau), where he headed the department of virology and hygiene. Working with Lutz Gissmann, zur Hausen first isolated human papillomavirus 6 by simple centrifugation from genital warts. Together with Ethel-Michelle de Villiers, who would marry zur Hausen after his divorce from his first wife, this group isolated HPV 6 DNA from genital warts, suggesting a possible new way of identifying viruses in human tumors. This paid off several years later in 1983 when zur Hausen identified HPV 16 DNA in cervical cancer tumors by Southern blot hybridization . This was followed by discovery of HPV18 a year later, thus identifying the culprits responsible for ~75% of human cervical cancer. This sparked a major scientific controversy with other scientists favoring herpes simplex as a cause for cervical cancer.

From 1983 until 2003 zur Hausen served as a chairman and member of the scientific advisory board of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ in German) in Heidelberg and professor of medicine at the University of Heidelberg. He also is editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Cancer. He is author of the book Infections Causing Human Cancer from 2006. On January 1, 2010 zur Hausen became the president of the German Cancer Aid, the leading organization fighting cancer in Europe. It was founded by doctor Mildred Scheel, the late “First Lady” of Germany. Zur Hausen has three sons from his first wife.