Wolfram Easter Day

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Wolfram Ostertag (born December 7, 1937 in Ludwigsburg ; † September 20, 2010 ) was a German geneticist.

life and work

Wolfram Ostertag was born as the son of Ferdinand and Helene Ostertag, b. Breuninger, born. After graduating from high school in 1956, he studied biology, chemistry and physics at the University of Mainz . A scholarship enabled him to stay at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1957/58 , where he did his bachelor's degree in 1958 . From 1958 to 1961 he was assistant to Hermann Joseph Muller , where he received his doctorate with a thesis on heredity research on Drosophila melanogaster . He then worked at the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Münster until 1966 , where he completed his habilitation with a thesis on chemical mutagenesis on human cells in the subject of basic research in human genetics . As a visiting scientist, he spent two years researching at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore , before becoming a working group leader in the molecular biology department at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen until 1979 . In addition, he became adjunct professor for human genetics at the University of Göttingen in 1972 and from 1979 to 1981 working group leader at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, Glasgow. From 1980 he was head of the cell and virus genetics department of the Heinrich Pette Institute for Experimental Virology and Immunology at the University of Hamburg and from 1995 to 1998 chairman of the board of directors of this institute. Since 1983 he has been an adjunct professor of genetics at the University of Hamburg, from which he retired in 2002 . From 2003 he was honorary professor at the Hannover Medical School .

Ostertag's areas of work were genetics , virology , cancer research, developmental biology and retroviral gene transfer. As early as the 1960s, he was investigating chemical mutagenesis in human cell cultures and discovered that caffeine causes breaks in chromosomes. He later examined the hematopoietic system, especially the differentiation of red blood cells . He coined the hybrid model of hematopoiesis , i.e. blood formation from stem cells , and described the formation of embryonic hemoglobins . He also developed retroviral vectors for gene transfer into embryonic and hematopoietic stem cells. These vectors are now used in most gene therapy studies to transport the foreign genes. In 1974 he was the first to describe the anti-retroviral properties of azidothymidine , which was later approved as the first drug against the HI virus .

Ostertag married Monika Knippenberg, with whom he had three children: Franka (* 1966), Isa (* 1971) and Edda (* 1975).

Publications

His publication list shows more than 230 publications, including:

  • The genetic basis of somatic damage produced by radiation in third instar larvae of Drosophila melanogaster . Ph. D. Thesis, Indiana University, 1961.
  • Chemical mutagenesis on human cells in culture . Habilitation thesis, Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz 1966

Awards

  • 1965 Prize of the Kind Philip Foundation for Leukemia Research (for the work: N. Kluge, A. Knebel, H. Meldris and W. Ostertag: Polycythemia vera as a model for studying the development of leukemia )
  • 1990 Prize from the Wilhelm Warner Foundation Hamburg
  • 1991 Prize of the Heinz Ansmann AIDS Foundation

Memberships

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The family's obituary in FAZ No. 229 of October 2, 2010, p. 37
  2. ↑ W. Ostertag and BJ Greif: The generation of chromatid breaks by caffeine in leukocyte cultures of humans . In: Human Genetics . Volume 3, No. 4, Springer, Berlin [u. a.], December 1967, pp. 282-294, ISSN  0340-6717 (print), ISSN  1432-1203 (online)
  3. ^ W. Ostertag, G. Roesler, CJ Krieg, J. Kind, T. Cole, T. Crozier, G. Gaedicke, G. Steinheider, N. Kluge and S. Dube: Induction of endogenous virus and of thymidine kinase by bromodeoxyuridine in cell cultures transformed by Friend virus . In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Volume 71, 1974, pp. 4980-4985.
personal data
SURNAME Easter day, tungsten
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geneticist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludwigsburg
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 2010