Dr. Ralph Grassmann passed away on July 1, 2008 at age 50. A professor at the Institute of Clinical and Molecular Virology in Erlangen, he was well known as a caring individual on a personal level and as a major contributer in HTLV-1 research. Several memories from colleagues celebrating his life may be viewed at Retrovirology.
Dr. Grassman graduated from Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 1985 with a Diploma in Biology. He continued his education at the laboratory of Bernhard Fleckenstein at the Institute of Clinical and Molecular Virology, University Erlangen-Nürnberg and in part in the laboratory of William Haseltine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, where he was introduced to HTLV-1. He received a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) in 1989 for work on a rhadinovirus vector for primary human T cells, which he also used to demonstrate HTLV-1 Tax transforming capacity. In 1990, Dr. Grassman became a research assistant and started an independent HTLV-1 research group at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Virology. In 1993, he reached assistant professor (Habilitation, Dr. med. habil.) before becoming a full professor of virology in 2000.