The Seminal Work of Werner Risau in the Study of the Development of the Vascular System

Abstract

Werner Risau was born on 18 December 1953. He studied chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Münster and University of Tübingen, respectively, before he went in 1984 to the laboratory of Judah Folkman at the Children’s Hospital of the Harvard Medical School, Boston. In 1999, Folkman wrote that “He had written to me that he wished to learn the arcane world of endothelial cells and the growth factors that regulate them. I answered that there was only one such factor, bFGF, and the existing supply was only a few micrograms, but that he was welcome to come nevertheless. He did. He quickly became an expert and then a pioneer on the role of this protein in neovascularization, and he also became intrigued with studying the development of the vascular system in the chick embryo (…). After he completed his fellowship and had left our lab, we watched with great pride his meteoric rise as a distinguished scientist known throughout the world.

In press in “International Journal of Developmental Biology”