Reinhard Kurth Memorial Lecture

Each year since 2014, a prominent medical virologist is invited to present The Reinhard Kurth Memorial Lecture held during IHV’s Annual International Meeting. The Memorial Lecture recognizes the outstanding career of Professor Reinhard Kurth, MD, and his enduring friendship with the Institute and its leadership. Dr. Kurth, Global Virus Network (GVN) Co-Founder and Institute of Human Virology Board of Advisors member, passed away on February 2, 2014 after a long valiant fight against cancer. Dr. Kurth was on the frontline of AIDS research having contributed to the understanding of how HIV attacks cells, ultimately leading to disease. He helped pioneer a scientific field that came to be known as endogenous human retrovirology, which focuses on viruses not known to cause disease, but may have important roles in biology. Dr. Kurth, through this cutting-edge research, provided biomedical scientists with the tools necessary to research with, and to study, viral sequences contained within the human genome.

Dr. Kurth was a leading figure in biomedicine in Germany. He served as chairman of the Foundation Council of the Ernst Schering Foundation and previously served as President of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute, the Robert Koch Institute and the German Drug Safety Institute. All three institutions are pivotal in safeguarding the health of the German people and critical partners to institutions globally. He was an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) as well as of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Dr. Kurth became a member of the American Philosophical Society. Among his many lifetime awards and honors for advancing medicine and science, Dr. Kurth received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of his scientific contributions and public service in 2005.

Previous Lectures

First Annual Reinhard Kurth Memorial Lecture, September 16, 2014 – Mark Kaplan, MD, University of Michigan Health System, “The Absence or Decrease Copy Number of the Centromeric K111 Endogenous Retroviruses in Patients with Cutaneous T cell Lymphoma and Sezary Syndrome”

Second Annual Reinhard Kurth Memorial Lecture, September 29, 2015 – Harald zur Hausen, MD, Nobel Laureate, German Cancer Research Center in the Helmholtz Associate, “Zoonotic Origin of Some Common Human Cancers and Multiple Sclerosis?”

Third Annual Reinhard Kurth Memorial Lecture, September 21, 2016 – Peter Vogt, PhD, The Scripps Research Institute, “The Non-coding Transcriptome: Regulation by MYC and Cancer-specific Transcripts”