Dr Hans August Messner 1941–2018

Abstract

Hans was born in Brunn, Czechoslovakia, in 1941 and grew up and went to school in Fulda, West Germany. After medical studies at the University of Freiburg and the University of Ulm in 1969, a love of science, relentless curiosity, and a spirit of adventure (and a serious failure to check out the climate in Canada) led him to pursue PhD studies at the Ontario Cancer Institute at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. Toronto in the 1960s was far from a sophisticated world city—it was not called ‘Toronto the Good’ for nothing. But what Hans knew very well was that Toronto was the home to the world-famous laboratories of James Till and Ernest McCulloch, which were at the epicenter of blood stem cell research at the time. What Hans could not, however, have known was that Toronto was also home to a young medical student named Sandy Shuve. The two met on Hans’ very first day in Toronto. Four years later they married. A short overseas gig in a famous lab in a faraway land best known for snow and polar bears had quickly turned into a most passionate professional and personal embrace lasting nearly five decades. And what decades they were, spanning two continents and the entire era of successful marrow transplantation to the present time.