When Harald zur Hausen painted the cow with the red blossom in its mouth on a yellow Post-it note: That was scientific slapstick at its finest, he laughed, we laughed, but no one could understand it. On this July day eleven years ago, a few dozen other Nobel laureates and their companions sat together around him to celebrate the Lindau Nobel Prize winners in the old Inselhalle directly on Lake Constance. In addition to the protocol, they were all busy with a particle physics sensation: In the week, the proof of the Higgs – the "God particle" – had been announced, a future Nobel Prize, no question, and we asked the Nobel Prize winners to paint down what went through their minds while thinking about the God particle with colored pencils on post-its.
Joachim Müller-Jung
Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.
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Many drew strokes, waves, it was a galactic scribble. Only Harald zur Hausen was somewhere else with his thoughts, he conjured up the cow with blossom on the leaf instead of the cosmic particle magic. Missed the topic? Not a bit, rather it was Harald zur Hausen, as he lived and breathed: my godfather's particle, that is my obsession. And this scientific obsession was, even if only a few suspected it at the time, already very closely linked to the cow or the cattle. A connection that would not let go of the cancer researcher and physician, at least not as long as he was able to enter his emeritus laboratory at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Almost until the end.
Cancer viruses in cows and milk?
No one had ever succeeded in wanting to put the brakes on Harald zur Hausen when he was about to be able to prove something significant and groundbreaking new for him against the resistance of the others. His younger wife, a virologist with whom he worked at an early age, whom he married in the early nineties and who pursued this latest cow hypothesis with him, was his most important ally in this respect. So this last decade in the life of Germany's most successful cancer researcher, despite all the struggles with age and some skeptics, was a highly promising, exciting time of experimentation for him. More spirit of research and resistance literally does not go on a cow's skin.
Zur Hausen's last major obsession stemmed from the early evidence that eating too much beef could cause cancer. Of course, there were indications that carcinogenic substances can be produced during frying itself, but poultry or pork is also fried. Why is there no increased risk of colorectal cancer here, zur Hausen wondered. His answer was: viruses. New oncogenic, i.e. carcinogenic viruses. More precisely: single-stranded DNA rings that made it into bovine tissue and also into milk.
In fact, cancer-causing viruses have always been the theme of Hausen's life. When he went to Gertrude and Werner Henle at the Children's Hospital of the University of Philadelphia in 1966 after his first academic position in Düsseldorf, he became familiar with Epstein-Barr viruses, which apparently cause Burkitt's lymphoma, which is widespread in Africa. As a university professor of virology in Erlangen-Nuremberg and then in Freiburg, he became convinced that cancer viruses are often central to tumorigenesis – at least much more often than the majority of his colleagues were willing to believe at the time.