Guest lecture by Thomas Boehm: Pandemics and vaccinations

Lecture in German language

Since time immemorial, mankind has been afflicted by pandemics. Everyone has heard of the plague epidemics in the Middle Ages, the cholera epidemics in the 19th century and the influenza epidemic at the beginning of the 20th century, and many others that have claimed millions and millions of victims. The Corona epidemic is only the latest example in this series.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, medical science was able to elucidate the cause of such epidemics. Socio-medical measures and the development of preventive vaccinations achieved such astonishing success that awareness of the threat posed by  infectious diseases seems to have been almost completely lost among the population.

Infectious diseases, however, are a general feature of all living nature and, as such, will never completely disappear. As such, they represent a perennial public health task for the protection of the population.

Thomas Boehm studied human medicine at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, with study visits to Columbia University in New York and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. In 1982, Thomas Boehm obtained his doctorate in Frankfurt, worked as a physician at the University Children's Hospital there, and habilitated in 1988. A five-year period at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (England) was followed by a professorship in Medical Molecular Biology at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg and a professorship in Experimental Therapy at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Since January 1998, he has been Director of the Department of Immune System Development at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg and Honorary Professor at the Medical Faculty of the University there. Thomas Boehm is an elected member of numerous scientific societies, including the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2018, he assumed the chairmanship of the Board of Trustees of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation. Thomas Boehm has been honored with numerous awards, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine, and the German Immunology Prize.