Gesellschaft für angewandte Vitaminforschung (GVF)

Vitamin- Preisträger 1995 - Seite 2

Magnifizenz, Spektabilitäten, meine sehr verehrten Damen und Herren, dear Dr. Sommer,

it is a great honour for all of us to have you here not only as our guest, but as the first who will be awarded the vitamin price of the Society of applied vitamin research.

The vitamin price of our society will be awarded every two years in the future and will be foreseen for highly distinguished scientists who earned merits in the field of applied vitamin research.

There is an independant jury which has to decide who will be awarded the vitamin price and the members of our present jury are Prof. Esterbauer from the University of Graz in Austria, Prof. Hautvast from the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, Dr. Hornig from Switzerland as the representative of the corporative members of our society and myself as the President of the society. All of us voted unisono for Dr. Sommer to be awarded with the vitamin price in this year to honour his outstanding activities on vitamin A-research.

To introduce Dr. Sommer in more detail I would like to focus on some outstanding events in his life. Alfred Sommer was born in 1942 in New York. He was awarded a BS from the Union College in New York in 1963. He became a MD in 1967 at the Harward Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts and in 1973 he became an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, MD, where he is now acting as the Dean of the medical Faculty.

His broad scientific background can be derived from different professional appointments, so Dr. Sommer acted as Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for the Prevention of Blindness. He was principal investigator in the Keratomalacia Prevention Assessment Programm in El Salvador as well as in the Keratomalacia Assessment Programm in Haiti and he led similar projects in Indonesia. Not only his outstanding role as an ophthalmologist but also his skills as a medical epidemiologist were a prerequisite to make all these important findings related with vitamin A. However his scientific background is not only limited to vitamin A and related diseases but much broader as is demonstrated by additional professional appointments of Dr. Sommer. He was engaged as Consultant in the Epidemiology Programm of the Center of Disease Control in Atlanta, he had additional appointments in the Cholera Research Laboratory in Dacca in Bangladesh, he acted as Consultant of WHO's Smallpox Eradication Programm and he was Consultant of the United Nations Relief Operations, to mention only some of his professional appointments.