Frank Rösl: Personalized Medicine: Hope or Media Hype?

In contrast to the concept of evidence-based medicine, PM focuses on the individual clinical phenotype and not on case-control studies encompassing a large cohort of treated patients. PM is mainly based on the current genome discourse, which has enormous implications for our society and for the definition of what we think a human being is. Frank Rösl will elaborate some case studies from the laboratory, from clinical studies, but will also discuss aspects of science communication, the concept of “reproducibility” in the current life sciences, and new visualisation strategies to bring knowledge and information about the science into the public realm.

Frank Rösl is based at the Centre for Cancer Research at the University of Heidelberg and since 2002 head of the Division of Viral Transformation Mechanisms, Research Programme “Infection, Inflammation and Cancer”. This field of research received considerable publicity when Harald zur Hausen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008, his mentor and colleague with whom Frank Rösl worked for over 15 years. Frank Rösl has been a professor in the Faculty of Theoretical Medicine, University of Heidelberg since 2001. His research fields are: innate immunity and viral escape mechanisms; metabolic aspects, intracellular energy sensoring; papillomaviruses and non-melanoma skin cancer, and vaccine development. In 1986 he received his doctorate from the Department of Molecular Biology of DNA Tumor Viruses, German Cancer Research Center. His habilitation thesis in 1994 was in virology at the faculty of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Heidelberg.

Because knowledge and innovation do not only evolve within a well-defined field, but rather through transgressing boundaries and through developing open and creative communication, Frank Rösl endeavours to bring art, science, and the humanities together to enable epistemic transfers. From 2008 to 2011 he was a member of the interdisciplinary research group “Bildkulturen” at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin, and in 2008 was co-applicant of the research project “Transfer-Knowledge — Knowledge-Transfer. On the History and Contemporary Relevance of Transfers between the Life Sciences and Humanities (1930/1970/2010)” in collaboration with the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) from 2009 to 2013.

The Guest Lecture Series of Professor Ingeborg Reichle’s lecture The World in Change: Introduction to Societal Transformation Processes opens up a comprehensive and wide-ranging perspective on global challenges that our societies are facing today. In our rapidly changing world we are currently confronting unprecedented dynamic processes on a global scale such as climate change, demographic change, mass migration, dwindling resources, violation of human rights, social inequality and poverty, mass unemployment and the redefinition of human work in the era of digitisation, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The lecture series is an informative and stimulating opportunity for students to hear from leading academics and experts in the fields of image theory, climate change, and cancer research/personalized medicine and will help our students build their network of contacts. Our guest lectures are open to all.