Swiss molecular biologist Charles Weissmann dies aged 94
Select your language
Generated with artificial intelligence.
Listening:
Swiss molecular biologist Charles Weissmann dies aged 94
World-renowned molecular biologist Charles Weissmann has died. The death occurred on Thursday night at the age of 94, the University of Zurich told the Swiss news Agency Keystone-ATS.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
The university has thus confirmed information from the weekly Tachles.
Weissmann made fundamental discoveries in the field of molecular biology, which have also decisively influenced medicine.
He made headlines for the discovery of the so-called cloned interferon, a protein now used to treat hepatitis B and certain types of cancer.
He then studied prions, abnormal protein agents. Scientists first encountered these in the 1980s in connection with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the so-called mad cow disease. Stanley Prusiner – who received the Nobel Prize – suggested a connection between the two.
The first evidence for this was provided by Weissmann. He showed that it was a protein already present in the body that triggered the disease. Abnormal proteins are also responsible for ills such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Weissmann’s name was evoked many times when talking about Nobel prizes, but he was never given the honour.
Weissmann was born in 1931 in Budapest, and grew up between Zurich and Rio de Janeiro. At the University of Zurich, he established the Institute of Molecular Biology.
Adapted from Italian by AI/ts
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.
Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.
If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch
External Content
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.