Hausen: The Entire Story

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Harald zur Hausen: The Entire Story
Tales by Hausen
Harald zur Hausen, the German Virologist, was born on March 11, 1936. He lived in the city of Gelsenkirchen-Buer. Hausen was extremely interested in the subjects of biology, birds, and other animals and flowers. However, he decided to focus his studies on medicine at the University of Bonn. He continued his education at the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf. He graduated in 1960. (Harald zur Hausen - Biographical, 2014) .
After graduating, Hausen knew he wanted to continue in the field of biology, however he wanted to be qualified in practicing medicine first. This led him to pursue surgery, internal medicine, gynaecology and obstetrics. Working in the gynaecology and obstetrics field particularly …show more content…

He began to look for postdoctoral positions in the United States. Hausen got an offer from Gerner and Gertrude Henle at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Hausen got married to Ethel-Michele de Villiers in 1964 and had a son with her, Jan Dirk, a year later. That year he also decided to pursue the offer in Philadelphia. He started working there in 1966. In that lab, the virologists were studying the new Epstein-Barr virus. Hausen wanted to work with a different virus due to his unfamiliarity with the virus. He worked with adenovirus type 12 so that he could become familiar with the molecular methods (Z. Hausen, …show more content…

In the laboratory, Hausen was fascinated by the Epstein-Barr virus, but he was not well acquainted with developing molecular biological methods. This guided him to study adenovirus type 12 (McIntyre, P. 2005). Studying this helped him show that Epstein-Barr virus particles were in single serologically antigen-positive Burkitt’s lymphoma cells. During his time there it was concluded the Epstein-Barr virus was a factor that causes infectious mononucleosis. Once Hausen transferred to the Institute for Virology at the University, he decided to concentrate his research on Epstein-Barr virus. He was able to have the first data available about non- Epstein-Barr virus producing Burkitt’s lymphoma cell line. He was also able to show the presence of Epstein-Barr virus DNA in Burkitt’s lymphoma and nasopharyngeal cancer biopsies. This was the first time they were able to show constant tumour virus DNA in human cancers. Once Hausen moved to Institute of Clinical Virology, he shifted his research to cervical cancer because it was believed to be caused by infectious agents. He tried to figure out what caused cervical cancer by using the same approach he used during his Epstein-Barr virus experiment. However, he was not successful. After that attempt, he hypothesized that since genital warts show to have papilloma-virus particles, that he might be a cause to cervical cancer. After

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