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Günter Scheuerbrandt, PhD. A short biography for those who want to know why I am
trying to help the families who have not been spared by Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
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I was born in 1930, in the former province of East Prussia in the former northeast
corner of Germany. When the war caught up with us in 1945, my family fled just in time,
and after a series of unusually lucky circumstances, we ended up in the opposite
southwest area of our country near Freiburg in the Black Forest without any material
belongings at all. As I had realized, that the only possessions nobody could ever
take away, were what I was able to learn, I finished high school in 1950 in spite
of all the difficulties. Then I started to study chemistry at the University of
Freiburg in 1951, continued in Grenoble/France 1954/55, made my diploma (= MS) in
Freiburg in 1957 and another one in Grenoble in 1959. In 1960 I got a doctorate in
sciences (PhD) in Freiburg again and finally spent two years, 1960/62, in the United
States as a postdoc at Harvard with Prof. Konrad Bloch and in Stanford with Prof.
Arthur Kornberg. After my return to Germany, I started working with the German
pharmaceutical company E. Merck in Darmstadt which, in 1968, sent me to the United States
again, where I worked as their representative for specialty chemicals and diagnostic tests
until 1973.
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In the United States I met Prof. Hans Zellweger in Iowa City who suggested
newborn screening for Duchenne muscular dystrophy with a bioluminescent
creatine kinase (CK) test using luciferase from fireflies as the main component.
After long discussions with many people, among them Prof. Peter Becker in Göttingen,
I decided to leave Merck and set up a private laboratory in the village of Breitnau
in the Black Forest 20 miles east of Freiburg and to concentrate on trying to help families
with Duchenne children getting an early diagnosis.
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In cooperation with the children's hospital in Freiburg, my co-workers and I perfected
the CK screening test by proving that Duchenne boys really could be detected
a few days or weeks after birth using dry blood spots as sample. In 1977, we started
a routine voluntary test program for all of Germany. As our state insurances do not pay
for screening for an incurable disease, we had to ask the parents to pay themselves for
the test. During the entire 30 years of our work, we tested more than half a million boys
within the first weeks after birth and found about 200 boys with Duchenne or Becker dystrophy.
But since there is still not cure for this terrible disease, participation in our program
is now very low. The laboratory has been moved in 2005 to Freiburg and is now part of the
clinical laboratory of Werner Kilchling, a physician for laboratory medicine. The financial
situation will probably force us to terminate the screening test program in the near future.
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From the beginning of our work with the screening program, I realized that not only
the families where we found a Duchenne boy early, but all other Duchenne families, too,
needed to have the disease explained to them carefully and to be informed about the
research efforts to find an effective therapy. For that reason, I will continue
writing my reports on all aspects of Duchenne research based mainly on the research
conferences organized by the Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy in the US, in the UK,
in Australia and other countries.
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In 1962, I got married in California with my wife Ute-Maria, a physical therapist
from Freiburg. Our daughter Iris is a physical therapist also. With her husband Ján,
an engineer from Slovakia, she has three children. Our son Ralph is a translator for many
languages. With his wife Mechthild, an ophthalmologist, he has two children. Although we have
no Duchenne boys in our family, I know quite well what it means to have a severely handicapped
child. Helping families with Duchenne children has become my life's destiny. I hope to be able to
continue this work for many more years to come.
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Günter Scheuerbrandt, PhD, Im Talgrund 2, D-79874 Breitnau, Germany
e-mail: gscheuerbrandt@t-online.de, Tel. *49-7652-1777.
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