2023-05-30 06:30:00
Ahen Harald zur Hausen drew the cow with the red flower in its mouth on a yellow post-it note: That was scientific slapstick at its finest, he laughed, we laughed, but no one could understand it. On that July day eleven years ago, a few dozen other Nobel Prize winners and their companions were sitting around him at the celebration of the Lindau Nobel Prize winners in the old Inselhalle directly on Lake Constance. In addition to the protocol, they were all busy with a particle physics sensation: In the week the detection of the Higgs – the “God particle” – had been announced, a future one Nobel prizeno question, and we asked the Nobel Prize winners to draw on Post-its with colored pencils what went through their minds when thinking about the God particle.
Many drew lines, waves, it was a galactic scribble. Only Harald zur Hausen had his thoughts elsewhere, instead of the cosmic particle magic he conjured up the cow with the flower on the sheet of paper. Topic missed? Not a bit, rather it was Harald zur Hausen, the way he lived: my God particle, that’s my obsession. And this scientific obsession was, even if only a few suspected it at the time, very closely linked to the cow or the cattle. A connection that should not let go of the cancer researcher and physician, at least not as long as he has his emeritus laboratory at German Cancer Research Center could enter in Heidelberg. So almost to the end.
Cancer viruses in cows and milk?
No one had ever succeeded in trying to slow down Harald zur Hausen when he was about to prove something that was important and groundbreaking to him against the resistance of others. His younger wife, a virologist he worked with early on, married in the early 1990s, and with whom he pursued this latest cow hypothesis, was his most important ally in this regard. So the last decade in the life of the most successful German cancer researcher, despite all the struggles with age and some skeptics, was a highly promising, exciting time of experimentation for him. There is literally no cowhide for more research and resistance spirit.
Zur Hausen’s last major obsession stemmed from the early evidence that eating too much beef could cause cancer. Of course, there were indications that carcinogenic substances can be produced during roasting, but poultry or pork is also roasted. Zur Hausen wondered why there is no increased risk of colon cancer here. His answer was: viruses. New oncogenic, i.e. carcinogenic viruses. More precisely: single-stranded DNA rings that are found in bovine tissue and also in the Milch managed.
In fact, cancer-causing viruses have always been the theme of life for the Hausens. When he went to Gertrude and Werner Henle at the Children’s Hospital of the University of Philadelphia in 1966 after his first academic position in Düsseldorf, he familiarized himself with the Epstein-Barr virus, which apparently causes Burkitt’s lymphoma, which is widespread in Africa. As a university professor of virology in Erlangen-Nuremberg and then in Freiburg, his conviction grew that cancer viruses are often central to the development of tumors – at least much more often than most of his colleagues were willing to believe at the time.
#couldnt #find #research #spirit #cowhide