The President of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Professor Matthias Kleiner, has congratulated the Heidelberg cancer researcher, Professor Harald zur Hausen, on being awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine. "The DFG, along with German science as a whole, is delighted that your pioneering research on cervical cancer has now been honoured with the highest accolade in science," said Kleiner in a letter of congratulations.
In the seventies and early eighties – among others, in a DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre at the University of Freiburg – zur Hausen was already working on proof that human papillomaviruses, otherwise known as wart viruses, are a major cause of cervical cancer. He thus laid the foundations for better prevention and treatment of this form of cancer, which has become the third most common form to affect women, emphasised Kleiner.
The Nobel Prize, continued Kleiner, always testifies to the productive capacity of an entire scientific system. The fact that another German has been awarded this prize, after the physicist Theodor Hänsch was honoured in 2005, and both Gerhard Ertl, the chemist and long-term Vice President of the DFG, and the physicist Peter Grünberg were honoured last year, is impressive evidence of the quality of research and science in Germany. Zur Hausen's scientific career and, above all, his long-standing role as Chairman of the Board of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg indicate the successful interconnection between university and non-university research in Germany – something that has been widely promoted by the DFG.
Finally, Kleiner drew attention to the Nobel Prize recipient's equally groundbreaking efforts in the area of communicating scientific findings to society in general. With the DKFZ's Cancer Information Service (KID), zur Hausen has created a broadly used and recognised medium, which provides the general public with well-founded and useful information on the topic of cancer.