Ekkehard Grundmann

Ekkehard Grundmann (born September 28, 1921 in Eibenstock ) is a German pathologist .

Life

Ekkehard Grundmann was born as the son of the senior degree director Fritz Grundmann and his wife Frieda. After graduating from high school in 1939, he was a soldier in the Navy and was released from British captivity in October 1945 . During the war he was able to study medicine for six semesters in Freiburg and Vienna . He continued his medical studies in Freiburg in 1946 and received his doctorate there after completing the state examination in 1950. med. After a year of internal medicine in Marburg , he became an assistant at the Institute for Pathology at the University of Freiburg , where he qualified as a professor in 1958 for general and special pathology and was appointed associate professor in 1963. In Freiburg he was able to demonstrate spectroscopically that DNA does not take place at the beginning of the cell nucleus division - as was assumed at the time - but in a special phase between two divisions, the S phase. He also succeeded in histological and cytological detection of two different types of lymphocytes , the later T and B lymphocytes. From 1963 to 1971 he headed the Institute for Experimental Pathology at Bayer AG in Wuppertal and was able to develop L-asparaginase as a therapeutic agent against leukemia .

He returned to the university in the autumn of 1971 and was full professor at the Institute for Pathology at the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster . Together with Hans Henning Matthiaß , director of the orthopedic clinic, he founded the Westphalia Bone Tumor Register in 1973 . From 1974/75 he was dean of the medical faculty and 1977/78 prorector of the university.

In addition to teaching and providing patient care, he and his staff mainly devoted themselves to cancer research, preferring to discover the preliminary stages of cancer in the breast, stomach and large intestine, which led to practical conclusions for early cancer detection. He was also able to realize this, as he was elected chairman of the Society for Combating Cancer Diseases in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1971 and chairman of the international scientific advisory board of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, and in 1974 chairman of the "Epidemiology" section of the federal government's "Overall Cancer Research Program" was called. From 1973 he was the founder and head of the epidemiological cancer register for the Münster administrative district . From 1979 to 1983 he was chairman of the Working Group of German Tumor Centers, where, in addition to diagnosing and combating tumor diseases, he emphasized the early detection of cancer. As President of the German Cancer Society , at the German Cancer Congress in Munich in 1986, he called on the health insurers to reward all women and men who regularly have cancer screening examinations by reducing their contributions. From 1987 to 1994 he was the representative of the Federal Republic of Germany and vice-president in the expert committee of the EU campaign “Europe against Cancer” in Brussels. In Münster he not only set up an oncological aftercare register, but also the first cancer counseling center in North Rhine-Westphalia for social and psychological counseling for patients released from inpatient treatment and their relatives. After his retirement in 1986, he remained active in the above-mentioned bodies, particularly as honorary chairman of the Society for Combating Cancer Diseases in North Rhine-Westphalia and from 1994 as honorary chairman of the Tumor Center in Münsterland.

In 1978 he was elected to the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts .

Awards

In 1969 he received the Italian State Prize for Industrial Health Protection, in 1982 the Antonio de Almeida - Commemorative Medal from the University of Campinas in Brazil, and in 1983 the medal from the Chilean Society for Medicine. In 1986 he became Honorary Professor (Prof.hc) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile . In 1988 he received the annual prize of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and in 1987 the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1993 he received an honorary doctorate (Dr.med.hc) from the Medical Faculty in Düsseldorf, in 1994 the honorary doctorate (Dr. med.hc) from the Medical Faculty Concepción in Chile and in 1999 the Rudolf Virchow Medal of the German Society for Pathology. He has been an honorary member of the Spanish Society of Pathology since 1965, of the American Association of Pathologists since 1977, of the Hungarian Society of Pathology since 1980, of the Chilean Society of Pathology since 1982 and of the European Society of Pathology since 1982. Grundmann has been a member of the Leopoldina since 1986 .

Works

In addition to over 300 scientific papers, mainly on onco-pathologists, he published textbooks and monographs:

• General Cytology 1964 (English 1966, Spanish 1967),
• Early Gastric Cancer (with H.Grunze, S. Witte) 1974,
• Textbook of Special Pathology 5th edition 1974, 6th edition 1979, 7th edition 1986,
• Atlas of Special Pathology 1986, (translated into English, Italian, Greek, Indonesian, Japanese),
• as Ed .: Introduction to General Pathology and Parts of Pathological Physiology. 1st edition 1976, 9th edition 1994.
• General histopathology course (with KvRudorff) 1st edition 1991, 2nd edition 1993,
• Tumor histology key (with P. Hermanek and G. Wagner) 2nd edition 1997,
• Basic documentation for tumor patients (with G. Wagner), 1st edition 1983, 5th edition 1999,
• Gerhard Domagk. The first winner over the infectious diseases 2001 (English 2002),
• This is cancer. Developments, findings, successes in 2007.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ekkehard Grundmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ekkehard Grundmann at the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and the Arts