Hans Grüneberg

Hans Grüneberg (26 May 1907 – 23 October 1982), whose name was also written as Hans Grueneberg and Hans Gruneberg, was a British geneticist. Grüneberg was born in Wuppertal–Elberfeld in Germany. He obtained an MD from the University of Bonn, a PhD in biology from the University of Berlin and a DSc from the University of London. He arrived in London in 1933, at the invitation of J.B.S. Haldane and Sir Henry Dale.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1956. in which his speciality was the study of pleiotropic effects of mutations on the development of the mouse skeleton.

He was the first person to describe siderocytes and sideroblasts, atypical nucleated erythrocytes with granules of iron accumulated in perinuclear mitochondria. This he reported in the journal Nature. The Grüneberg ganglion, an olfactory ganglion in rodents, was first described by Hans Grueneberg in 1973.

Career Honorary Research Assistant, University College London, 1933–38 Moseley Research Student of Royal Society, 1938–42 Captain, Royal Army Medical Corps, 1942–46 Reader in Genetics, University College London, 1946–55 Honorary Director of the Medical Research Council Experimental Genetics Unit at University College London, 1955–1972 Professor of Genetics University College London, 1956–1974 Affiliated with the Department of Pathology, Mount Vernon Hospital, Northwood, Middlesex Emeritus Professor University College London, from retirement, 1974

Books 1947. Animal genetics and medicine. Hamish Hamilton, London. 1952. The genetics of the mouse. 2nd ed, revised and enlarged. Nijhoff, The Hague. 1963. The pathology of development: a study of inherited skeletal disorders in animals. Wiley, London.