Photograph (Copyright Duke University) Prof. Victor J. Dzau (Duke University Durham/USA), pioneer in the treatment of congestive heart failure and hypertension, has been awarded the Max Delbrück Medal on October 14, 2004 in Berlin/Germany.

For his “outstanding contributions to research and therapy of cardiovascular diseases” Prof. Victor J. Dzau from Duke University in Durham/North Carolina (USA) has been awarded the Max-Delbrück Medal in a ceremony at the Charité University Medicine in Berlin/Germany on October 14, 2004. “When looking back at your scientific work, today we are spanning about 30 years of your in-depth analysis of key regulatory factors in the cardiovascular system”, Dr. Joachim-Friedrich Kapp from Schering AG said in his address.“ Dr. Dzau is a pioneer in the therapeutic management of congestive heart failure (CHF) and hypertension” he stressed and especially referred to the so-called ACE-blockers to treat CHF. In addition, Dr. Dzau has developed gene and, most recently, cell therapeutic approaches toward the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. One such treatment involves a gene therapeutic approach to ensure sustainable bypass surgery by “arming” the grafted veins in such a way that they are not blocked by artherosclerosis. This approach is being tested in two large multicenter clinical trials (Phase III) in the USA. Dr. Dzau is not only a basic researcher and medical doctor, but also an entrepreneur. At the end of the nineties, he founded two biotech companies in California (Clingenix and Corgentech). The latter coordinates those clinical trials on coronary bypass-surgery.

Victor Dzau was born in 1947 in Shanghai/China. His father owned a chemical factory and was teaching chemistry at the university. After his factory was confiscated, the family of five flew to Hong Kong. Fifteen years later his father was able to send him to Canada to study medicine at McGill University. His two sisters joined Victor Dzau in 1968 and 1970, respectively, and his parents followed suit in 1972. That same year Victor Dzau received his M.D. from McGill University and went to Cornell Medical Center in New York (USA). In 1973, he joined the Brigham and Women`s Hospital of Harvard University in Boston where he became Head of the Division of Vascular Medicine and Atherosclerosis in 1984. From 1990 – 1996 he was Chairman of the Institute of Medicine at Stanford University in California. He returned to Harvard University in 1996 as Head of the Department of Medicine, Director of Research and the Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine. Since summer 2004, he has lead the Medical Center and Health System of Duke University.

Victor Dzau is member of several prestigious organizations including the Academia Sinica of China and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Furthermore, he has been named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in Great Britain and a “Distinguished Scientist” of the American Heart Association. Dr. Dzau serves as an advisor to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has also advised the governments of Canada, South Africa, and Taiwan on biomedical and healthcare programs. Moreover, he has published almost 300 papers, more than 240 editorials, reviews, and book chapters as well as ten scientific and medical textbooks.

Begun in 1992, the Max Delbrück Medal is given annually to an outstanding scientist. It is awarded at the "Berlin Lectures on Molecular Medicine", organized by the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, the three Universities in Berlin, biomedical research institutions, and the Schering Forschungsgesellschaft (Research Foundation). The MDC is a national research laboratory of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, and named after the Nobel Prize Winner Max Delbrück, a Berlin born physicist and biologist (September 4, 1906 Berlin – March 10, 1981 Pasadena/USA).

The first Berlin-Lecturer was Professor Günter Blobel from the Rockefeller University, New York and Nobel laureate for medicine in 1999. His successors were the geneticist and Nobel laureate for medicine, Professor Sydney Brenner from the University of Cambridge (UK), the neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux from the Pasteur-Institute in Paris (France), the cancer researcher Professor Robert A. Weinberg from the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge/USA, the prion researcher Professor Charles Weissmann from the University of Zürich (Switzerland), Professor Svante Pääbo Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (both in Germany), the Nobel laureate for chemistry from 1980, Paul Berg from Stanford University/California (USA) and the biochemist Professor Joan Argetsinger Steitz from Yale University, New Haven/Connecticut (USA). Recent award recipients include Professor Eric Lander from the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, USA (2001) and the biochemist and pharmacologist, Professor Roger Y. Tsien from Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of California San Diego, USA (2002) and Dr. Ronald McKay from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), Bethesda, USA in 2003.

Barbara Bachtler

Press and Public Affairs

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