Wilhelm Stoffel

Wilhelm Stoffel (born April 30, 1928 in Cologne ) is a German biochemist . He is head of the Laboratory for Molecular Neuroresearch at the Center for Biochemistry of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne and research group leader at the Center of Molecular Medicine Cologne, Cologne.

Stoffel studied medicine at the University of Cologne from 1947, where he passed his medical state examination in 1952 and received his doctorate at the Physiological-Chemical Institute. Before that he was in 1951 on a scholarship at the Institute of Biochemistry at Uppsala University . In 1953 he completed a chemistry course at the University of Bonn with a diploma in 1957. Then he was on a Rockefeller scholarship until 1959 at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City with Ahrens and Craig . In 1959 he received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Cologne (Synthesis of Bacitracin A related structures) . From 1959 to 1960 he was at the Institute for Biochemistry at the ETH Zurich and then assistant at the University of Cologne , where he completed his habilitation in Physiological Chemistry in 1962 (on the biosynthesis of polyene fatty acids) . In 1964 he became a lecturer there and in 1967 a full professor of biochemistry and director of the Institute of Biochemistry. In 1981 he founded the first German graduate college at the University of Cologne, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. In 1993 he founded the Center for Molecular Medicine (ZMMK) in Cologne, which he headed until 1996 and then accompanied its neuroscience department.

Among other things, Stoffel dealt with the structure of cell membranes, especially in nerve cells ( myelin sheath of the axons , lipids such as sphingolipids occurring there ), the cells involved in their structure ( oligodendrocytes in the case of the central nervous system) and related diseases, which he, for example, genetically related defects in the mouse model studied.

In 1978 he received the Otto Warburg Medal and the Wilhelm Feldberg Prize , in 1965 the Heinrich Wieland Prize , the Zülch Prize of the Max Planck Society in 1998 and the Ernst Jung Prize in 1990 and the Max Planck in 1992 Research award . Stoffel is a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences (1984) and the Leopoldina (1969). In 1992 he received an honorary doctorate (medicine) from the University of Hamburg and in 2008 from the University of Cologne.

Stoffel has been married since 1958 and has four children.

Web links

• Website at the University of Cologne
• Stoffel on the part of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts
• Website at CECAD, University of Cologne

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Stoffel (with picture) at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on July 22, 2016.