Team:Heidelberg/Human Practice/Nobel Prize

From 2008.igem.org


Interview with Nobel Prize Winner Harald zur Hausen


Prof. Harald zur Hausen

06 Oct. 2008, Medicine Nobel Prize goes to DKFZ Heidelberg
Harald zur Hausen (DKFZ Heidelberg) is awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the cancerous Papilloma virus, which envisions today a vaccination against infection. He shares the prize with Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier (both Institut Curie, Paris) for their discovery of the HIV. Harald zur Hausen has been chair of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) here in Heidelberg from 1983 to 2003 and lead the institute to its world wide reputation. The Heidelberg iGEM team congratulates him to this historic honor!!

Important Information
We had the great chance to interview Prof. zur Hausen about his opinion about science communication via mail. You find the questions we sent him in the box below. But since Prof. zur Hausen is very occupied at the moment (as you can imagine), he will not be able to answer up to the wiki-freezing date on wednesday, october 29th. Thus we set an external link, where we will post the result of the interview hopefully a few days after the wiki-freezing.
The interview will be available under the following Link: Interview with Nobel Prize Winner Prof. zur Hausen

Questions send to Prof. zur Hausen via mail

1) Concerning your relations to the media - has something changed after the publication of the decision of the Nobel Prize committee?
(Was hat sich geändert nach der Verkündung der Entscheidung, insbesondere in Bezug auf Zusammenarbeit mit den Medien?)

2) Which are the three questions that you are asked most by the media?
(Welches sind die drei Fragen, die Ihnen zurzeit am häufigsten gestellt werden von Journalisten (am Besten in Reihenfolge der Häufigkeit)?)

3) How important do you consider communicating your work to the public and why?
(Wie wichtig ist es für Sie bzw. warum ist es wichtig für Sie, ihre Forschung einem breiten Publikum zu erklären?)

4) What do you think, how many per cent of randomly picked pedestrians in Heidelberg know, what synthetic biology means?
(Was glauben Sie, wie viel Prozent der Menschen in Heidelberg (zufällig ausgesucht in der Fußgängerzone) wissen, was synthetische Biologie ist?)

5) What would you advise us to do / never do when communicating our work?
(Haben Sie einen Ratschlag für uns, was wir bei der Kommunikation unserer Arbeit nie / auf jeden Fall tun sollten?)