Henri-Géry Hers

Henri-Géry Hers received his medical doctorate in 1948. In his second year as a student he became an étudiant-chercheur in the physiological laboratory of Joseph Prosper Bouckaert (1896-1976). There he worked with Christian Marie René Joseph de Duve (1917-1978), the 1974 Nobel Prize winner in biochemistry, on the action of insulin. He becaame an agrégé in 1956 and was appointed professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain in 1967.

In 1966, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Biological and Medical Sciences, and in 1975 he was awarded the Gairdner Foundation International Award of the Gairdner Foundation. Hers was a member of the Académie de Médecine.

In 1988 Henri-Géry Hers and Elizabeth F. Neufeld from the UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles, shared the Wolf Foundation Prize in Medicine for the biochemical elucidation of lysosomal storage diseases and the resulting contributions to biology, pathology, prenatal diagnosis and therapeutics. He retired that year.

We thank Frans Huijing for information submitted.