Harald zur Hausen Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

He was editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Cancer until the end of 2010.

On 1 January 2010, zur Hausen became the president of German Cancer Aid, the largest cancer charity in Europe.

Zur Hausen received the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2008 for his contributions to medical science.

Zur Hausen shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the discoverers of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

The award of the 2008 Nobel Prize to Zur Hausen became controversial following the revelation that Bo Angelin, a member of the Nobel Assembly that year, also sat on the board of AstraZeneca, a company that earns patent royalties for HPV vaccines. The controversy was exacerbated by the fact that AstraZeneca had also entered into a partnership with Nobel Web and Nobel Media to sponsor documentaries and lectures to increase awareness of the prize. However, colleagues widely felt that the award was deserved, and the secretary of the Nobel Committee and Assembly issued a statement affirming that Bo Angelin was unaware AstraZeneca’s HPV vaccine patents at the time of the vote.

From 2007 to 2011, zur Hausen was a member of the scientific advisory board of Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.

Zur Hausen has three sons from his first marriage. In 1993, he married his second wife, Professor Ethel-Michele de Villiers, who at the time was a fellow researcher at the German Cancer Research Center. He currently lives with his wife in Wald-Michelbach, Hesse.

Working with Lutz Gissmann, zur Hausen first isolated human papillomavirus 6 by simple centrifugation from genital warts. Together with Ethel-Michele de Villiers, whom he married after his divorce from his first wife, he isolated HPV 6 DNA from genital warts, suggesting a possible new way of identifying viruses in human tumors. This discovery paid off several years later, in 1983, when zur Hausen identified HPV 16 DNA in cervical cancer tumors by means of Southern blot hybridization. This was followed by the discovery of HPV18 a year later, thus identifying the causes of approximately 75% of human cervical cancer. The announcement of his breakthrough 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 chairman and scientific advisory board member of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ in German) in Heidelberg and as professor of medicine at Heidelberg University.

Zur Hausen’s field of research is the study of oncoviruses. In 1976, he hypothesized that human papillomavirus plays an important role in causing cervical cancer. Together with his collaborators, he then identified HPV16 and HPV18 in cervical cancers in 1983–84. This research made possible the development of the HPV vaccine, the first formulation of which was commercialized in 2006. He is also credited with discovery of the virus causing genital warts (HPV 6) and a monkey lymphotropic polyomavirus that is a close relative to a recently discovered human Merkel cell polyomavirus, as well as of techniques to immortalize cells with Epstein-Barr virus and to induce replication of the virus using phorbol esters. His work on papillomaviruses and cervical cancer received a great deal of scientific criticism when first published but subsequently was confirmed and was used as the basis for research on other high-risk papillomaviruses.

Two years after qualifying as a medical doctor, he joined the Institute for Microbiology at the University of Düsseldorf as a laboratory assistant. After three and a half years there, he moved to Philadelphia to work at the Virus Laboratories of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia together with eminent virologists Werner and Gertrude Henle, who had escaped from Nazi Germany. In 1967, he contributed to a ground-breaking study that for the first time proved a virus (Epstein–Barr virus) can turn healthy cells (lymphocytes) into cancer cells. He became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1969, he returned to Germany to become a regular teaching and researching professor at the University of Würzburg’s 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.

Zur Hausen was born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, in a Catholic family. He completed his Abitur at Gymnasium Antonianum in Vechta, then 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.

Harald zur Hausen NAS EASA APS (German pronunciation: [ˈhaʁalt tsuːɐ̯ ˈhaʊzn̩] (listen); born 11 March 1936) is a German virologist and professor emeritus. He has done research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008.