Hans Popper (doctor)

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Hans Philipp Popper (born November 24, 1903 in Vienna ; † May 6, 1988 in New York City ) was a Viennese pathologist who, due to his Jewish descent , was dismissed from the University of Vienna after the "Anschluss" of Austria to the Third Reich and subsequently fled to the USA. He received worldwide recognition, particularly in the field of hepatopathology.

Life

Hans Popper was a son of the of the Pilsen region originating physician Carl Popper and his wife Emilie, née Green Tree. The philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was his cousin. After graduating from the humanistic academic high school , a Viennese elite school, Popper enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1922 , where he studied chemistry and medicine . He obtained his doctorate in 1928. He first worked in pathology, later in surgery and then in ear, nose and throat medicine . Popper spent another five years in Vienna as an internist . From 1933 he worked at the 1st Medical University Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital under Hans Eppinger (1879-1946). During this time, together with Emil Mandel and Helene Mayer, he developed the universally used creatinine clearance test for the quantitative assessment of kidney function.

Escape

On the day the German troops marched into Austria , March 12, 1938, Popper was locked in his office by a clinic colleague dressed in an SS uniform. He was released the morning of the following day. Eppinger underestimated the impact this incident had on Popper. In addition, Popper was suspended from duty for reasons of “maintaining order at the clinic”. Due to his contacts in Vienna and Chicago, he got an entry visa and an exit permit very quickly. He was warned by a confidante from the college that an arrest by the Gestapo was imminent, whereupon he hastily left Austria and drove to Rotterdam , where he left Europe behind on its maiden voyage to New York on board the SS New Amsterdam could save the escape from the concentration camp .

Life in exile

Popper went to the University of Illinois , where he received a Master of Science in Pathology in 1941 and his second doctorate in 1944, the Doctor of Pathology and Physiology. He married Lina, née cheap, who had also emigrated from Vienna. They had two sons, Frank (* 1944, later professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey) and Charles (* 1946). After his naturalization, he served in the US Army with the rank of major until the end of World War II .

Scientific career

From 1946 to 1957 he was director of the Institute of Pathology at Cook County Hospital . Eppinger allowed him to take a fluorescence microscope with him when he escaped from Vienna. It has now become a pivotal tool in his groundbreaking studies of tissue vitamin A in humans and animals. Andrew Conway Ivy , one of the foremost experimental pathologists of the era, was so impressed with Han's ability to identify small amounts of vitamin A in kidney slices that he became one of his closest friends and staunch supporters. Fluorescence microscopy logically led to the liver , and almost overnight Hans was captivated by liver disease, a common illness at Cook County Hospital. At the end of the 1940s he met Sheila Sherlock , with whom he is considered the founder of hepatology. He was also the founder and from 1943 to 1957 Scientific Director of the Hectoen Institute for Medical Research . He was also the initiator of the founding of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) in 1948. Popper gave lectures worldwide at all well-known congresses dealing with liver diseases. He researched and unraveled intrahepatic cholestasis and the early stages of liver fibrosis . His classic studies on the histogenesis of cirrhosis and the vascular supply of the cirrhotic liver were made in the 1950s.

In 1957 Popper went to New York to the Mount Sinai Hospital and became the director of the Institute of Pathology there. He played a central role in founding the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1963 (now the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ), where he became dean and later president. Even after his retirement in 1973, he continued his research. After the identification of the hepatitis B virus in the late 1960s, he was increasingly fascinated by the pathogenesis and the highly variable morphological and clinical manifestations of this and other viral infections of the liver. He was one of the first to postulate the oncogenic potential of the hepatitis B virus and to recognize the critical importance of this property for viral carriers worldwide. Equally important was his realization that studying and understanding these problems required knowledge of the concepts and techniques of modern molecular biology , virology , immunology, and oncology . Other important contributions concerned the very variable morphology of non-A and non-B hepatitis as well as the biology and pathogenesis of delta hepatitis. He also made the important observation that occupational exposure to monovinyl chloride is hepatotoxic and often leads to the occurrence of hepatic angiosarcoma . One of his accidental discoveries was that the human liver, unlike other organs, does not age.

In the 1980s, Hans Popper briefly fell into the shadows due to a permissive and euphemistic attitude towards his former academic teacher - the doctor and Nazi criminal Hans Eppinger. In a difficult to understand, probably suppressed, "scientific loyalty" to his former mentor, he appeared several times as a Jewish persecuted as laudator of the Nazi war criminal at the award of the Eppinger Prize for outstanding achievements and contributions to liver research , which the Falk Foundation in Freiburg im Breisgau since 1973. In 1989 the Falk Foundation Prize was renamed the International Hans Popper Prize .

Hans Popper died on May 6, 1988 in New York City of complications from pancreatic cancer .

Honorary doctorate

Awards

Publications (selection)

Popper was the author and co-author of 821 publications and 28 books covering all areas of hepatology.

  • Literature in NDB
  • 1926 About a new micro-determination method for carbohydrates in organs and body juices. Biochem. Ztschft. 175: 371.
  • 1937 with J. Boeck, about liver transplantation in the anterior chamber of the eye. Virchow Arch. Path. Anat. 299: 219.
  • 1937 with E. Mandel, H. Mayer, On the diagnostic significance of plasma creatinine determination. Ztschft. Klin. Med. 133: 56.
  • 1941 The histological distribution of vitamin A in human organs under normal and pathologic conditions. Arch. Path. 51: 766. 1943
  • 1941 with F. Steigmann, Intrahepatic obstructive jaundice. Gastroenterology 1: 645.
  • 1951 with SS Waldstein, Liver cirrhosis: Relation between function and structure based on biopsy studies. Arch. Intern. Med. 87: 844. 1952
  • 1951 with D. Koch-Weser, J. de la Huerga, Hepatic necrosis due to bromobenzene and its dependence upon available sulfur amino acids. Proc. Soc. Exper. Biol. Med. 79: 196.
  • 1957 with F. Schaffner, Liver: Structure and Function. New York: Blakiston Div., McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.
  • 1957 Transition from hepatitis into cirrhosis. Amer. J. Dig. Dis. 2: 397.
  • 1959 with F. Schaffner, Drug-induced hepatic injury. Ann. Intern. Med. 51: 1230.
  • 1963 with F. Schaffner, Capillarization of hepatic sinusoids in man. Gastwenterology 44: 239. 1965
  • 1963 with E. Rubin, F Schaffner, Primary biliary cirrhosis. Chronic nonsuppurative destructive cholangitis. Amer.J. Path. 46: 387.
  • 1966 with S. Bronfenmajor, F. Schaffner, Fat-storing cells (lipocytes) in human liver. Arch. Path. 82: 447. 1966
  • 1966 with CS Davidson, B. Babior, Concerning hepatotoxicity of halothane. New Engl. J. Med. 275: 1497.
  • 1967 with F. Deinhardt, Studies on the transmission of human viral hepatitis to marmoset monkeys. I. Transmission of disease, serial passages, and description of liver lesions./. Exp. Med. 125: 673.
  • 1968 with De Groote, A classification of chronic hepatitis. Lancet 2: 626.
  • 1975 with LB Thomas, Vinyl-chloride induced liver disease. From idiopathic portal hypertension (Banti's syndrome) to angiosarcoma. N. Engl.J. Med. 292: 17.
  • 1978 with HJ Alter, transmissible agent in non-A, non-B hepatitis. Lancet 1: 459.
  • 1979 PD Berk, et al., Veno-occlusive disease of the liver after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. Ann. Intern. Med. 90: 158. 1981
  • 1979 with SN Thung et al., Animal model of human disease: chimpanzee carriers of hepatitis B virus. At the. J. Pathol. 105: 328.
  • 1982 with MA Gerber, SN Thung, The relation of hepatocellular carcinoma to infections with hepatitis B and related viruses in man and animals. Hepatology 2: 1.
  • 1983 with M. Rizzetto et al., Chronic hepatitis in carriers of hepatitis B surface antigen, with intrahepatic expression of the delta antigen. An active and progressive disease unresponsive to immunosuppressive treatment. Ann. Intern. Med. 98: 437.
  • 1986 with PL Marion, et al., Hepatocellular carcinoma in ground squirrels persistently infected with ground squirrel hepatitis virus, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 83: 4543.
  • 1987 Hepatocarcinogenicity of the woodchuck hepatitis virus. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 84: 866.
  • 1987 with G. Acs et al., Hepatitis B virus produced by transfected Hep G2 cells causes hepatitis in chimpanzees. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 84: 4641.
  • 1987 with FV Chisari, et al., Structural and pathological effects of synthesis of hepatitis B virus large envelope polypeptide in transgenic mice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 84: 6909.

swell

  • S. Kaiser, J. Sziranyi, D. Gross , Der Hepatopathologe Hans Popper (1903-1988) , Pathologist 40, 457-466 (2019). doi: 10.1007 / s00292-019-0617-0
  • R. Schmid, S. Schenker, Hans Popper In Memoriam 1903–1988 . Hepatology 1989: 9; 669-674

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ HE Blum, KP Maier, J. Rodés, T. Sauerbruch: Liver Diseases: Advances in Treatment and Prevention . Springer Science & Business Media, June 25, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7923-8794-7 , p. 216.
  2. ↑ a b Rudi Schmid, Hans Popper , National Academy of Sciences, 1994. accessed on February 14, 2020.
  3. ↑ Hans Popper , Leopoldina
personal data
SURNAME Popper, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Popper, Hans Philipp
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American pathologist, founder of hepatology
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH May 6, 1988
Place of death New York City