5Arnold Graffi
June 19, 1910 in Bistritz, Romania –
January 30, 2006 in Berlin
Arnold Graffi was a Romanian-German physician and cancer researcher. His work yielded important insights into how chemical substances can cause cancer and how tumors form.
Graffi studied medicine between 1930 and 1935, first in Marburg and later in Leipzig and Tübingen. Initially most of his work was clinical in nature; he moved to the Charité, where he worked from 1937 to 1939 for Ferdinand Sauerbruch and others. Graffi’s next position was for a year at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute in Frankfurt am Main, until he received his doctorate at the Charité. His next stops were Prague and Budapest, for research. In 1943 he returned to Berlin, where he first worked at Schering AG and then for Nobel Prize winner Otto Warburg, at the KWI for Cell Physiology. In 1948 he was appointed to a professorship at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin. That same year Graffi began working at the Academy Institute for Medicine and Biology in Berlin-Buch, where he set up the department for experimental cancer research. There he discovered that not only chemical compounds but also viruses – oncogenic viruses – could cause cancer. One of them went down in the specialist literature as the ”Graffi virus“. Further work produced insights into the relationship between the structures and dosages of substances and viruses and their carcinogenic effects.
In 1961 the institute in Berlin-Buch was split into several entities, and Graffi became director of the newly founded Institute for Experimental Cancer Research. In 1964 this merged with the Robert-Rössle-Clinic to form the Institute for Cancer Research; Graffi was named deputy director.
During his time in Buch, Arnold Graffi formulated a DNA-based concept for therapies for cancer and viral and hereditary diseases, an approach based on ”nucleic acid anti-matrices“. Ultimately this idea formed the basis for today’s efforts to create gene therapies. Arnold Graffi remained scientifically active even after his retirement in 1975. In 1979, he received the Paul-Ehrlich-Prize for his work in the field of cancer. He died in Berlin in 2006.
Graffi‘s findings and his fundamental ideas on gene therapies made him a pioneer in experimental cancer research.
Gerhard Rommel, Bronze, 2003
