George Klein

Professor George Klein was Professor Emeritus in Tumour Biology at Karolinska Institutet and up to the last was an active researcher at the Department of Microbiology, Tumour And Cell Biology, MTC. After completing his medical studies and a PHD degree, Georg Klein was awarded a personal professorship in 1957. A donation from Riksföreningen mot cancer (now Cancerfonden) enabled him and his wife to build up the Department of Tumour Biology at Karolinska Institutet, which was later to become a world-leading centre in tumour biology for four decades. This interdisciplinary department combined genetics, infection models, immunology and animal models to come to grips with the problem set associated with cancer. For a wider audience, Georg Klein became known as an author after his first book was published in 1984, with both a philosophical-humanistic and a popular-scientific thrust. One of his best-known books is perhaps Om kreativitet och flow (On creativity and flow), Bromberg, which he co-authored. Achieving flow was a strong driving force for Georg Klein. The book first appeared in 1990 and a new edition was published in 2012. In recent years he published Jag återvänder aldrig. Essäer i Förintelsens skugga (I will never return. Essays in the shadow of the Holocaust), Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2011, about anti-Semitism in Klein’s former home country Hungary. Georg Klein won innumerable prizes and awards over the years for his work in cancer research. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Karolinska Institutet’s Nobel Assembly between 1957 and 1993, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA.