Yesterday, zur Hausen, now an emeritus professor at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, was one of three scientists who won the Nobel Prize in medicine. With the HPV vaccine now being distributed to millions of females, his finding promises to make inroads against cervical cancer, which kills 250,000 women every year, mostly in the developing world.
"I'm not prepared for this," zur Hausen, 72, told the Associated Press yesterday. "We're drinking a little glass of bubbly right now."
It was the second year in a row that a scientist with Philadelphia ties won a Nobel Prize in medicine. Mario Capecchi, an Italian street urchin after World War II who emigrated to Bucks County and graduated from the George School, shared the 2007 prize for his work in targeting genes.
Peter Howley, who chairs Harvard University's pathology department, said it was not just zur Hausen's perseverance and insight but his collaborative spirit that helped make the vaccine possible.
"He and his colleagues were very generous in making their [ideas] available to the community," Howley said.
Zur Hausen came to Penn from Dusseldorf, Germany, in 1965, recruited by Werner and Gertrude Henle to research the link between another virus, Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), and a cancer known as Burkitt's lymphoma.
In an interview with The Inquirer in 2006, zur Hausen recalled that he could barely speak English at the time.
"Gertrude was talking enormously and flooding me with information about a virus I had never heard of before," he said. "I tried to hide my ignorance. Anyway, they decided to accept me."
While doing groundbreaking work showing how EBV could invade human DNA, zur Hausen started thinking about cervical cancer.
For decades, scientists had noted evidence that cervical cancer was connected to a sexually transmitted pathogen. Nuns, for instance, rarely if ever got the disease.
Genital herpes was a focus at the time, as the sexual revolution was aiding its spread.
