Willy burgdorfer interview

Willy burgdorfer created lyme disease
Irp.nih.gov › blog › post › 2015/02 › the-great-willy-burgdorfer-1925-2014.
Wilhelm Burgdorfer (June 27, 1925 – November 17, 2014) was a Swiss-American scientist and an international leader in the field of medical entomology.

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Willy Burgdorfer

Willy Burgdorfer was born in Basel, the son of Karl Burgdorfer, a corporal in the police, Criminal Investigation Department, and his wife, Elsa, née Hafner. He attended primary school in Kleinhünigen and in 1936 entered the Realgymnasium Basel, graduating in 1944. In spring that year he began his studies at the Faculty of Philosphy and Natural Sciences at the Iniversity of Basel. From June 1949 to June 1950 he was a scientific collaborator at the Bibliothek des Schweizerischen Tropeninstitutes in Basel. He received his PhD from the University of Basel in 1952, and later received honorary MD degrees from the University of Bern and University of Marseille. He is elected to the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences.

Willy Burgdorfer is an international leader in researching interactions between animal and human disease agents and their transmission by blood-feeding arthropods, especially ticks. a medical. When he discovered "his" spirochete in 1982, Burgdorfer was an entomologist with the National Institutes of Health, Hamilton Montana.

He has received numerous awa

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Willy Burgdorfer inoculating ticksNIAID/RML

Wilhelm “Willy” Burgdorfer, who spent decades researching arthropod-borne infections, died last week (November 17) at age 89.

Burgdorfer was a scientist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Hamilton, Montana. He was best known for identifying the spiral-shaped bacterium that causes Lyme disease, which was named Borrelia burgdorferi in his honor. Burgdorfer was an expert in “tick surgery,” as he called it, according to The New York Times, and studied tick- and insect-borne diseases including Rocky Mountain spotted fever, relapsing fevers, and plague.

In the early 1980s, Allen Steere of the Yale University School of Medicine and others had already surmised that the cause of fevers and swollen joints among children near Lyme, Connecticut, was ...

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The Great Willy Burgdorfer, 1925–2014

By Lucy Bauer

When we think of research that makes a difference, we often picture individuals whose particular discoveries marked watershed moments in scientific history. One such person who made a substantial impact on biomedical science and human health was biologist Wilhelm “Willy” Burgdorfer, Ph.D., who passed away on November 17, 2014, after 89 years of life.

Dr. Burgdorfer was a medical entomologist, self-described “tick surgeon,” and later scientist emeritus at the NIH IRP, working out of the NIAID Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) in Hamilton, Montana. Along with Alan Barbour, M.D., a colleague at RML, Dr. Burgdorfer discovered the infectious agent that causes Lyme disease, a bacterial spirochete that now bears his name: Borrelia burgdorferi. Approximately 300,000 people are estimated to contract Lyme disease each year in the U.S.

“Willy was a generous colleague and had a great sense of humor,” remembers Dr. Tom Schwan, a Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Zoonotic Pathogens at RML and one of Dr. Burgdorfer’s close collabor