Dr. Fritz Bach was one of the three distinguished recipients of the 1998 Medawar Prize. His scientific accomplishments are enormous and have spanned four decades. He was also appointed as the first recipient of the Lewis Thomas Chair at Harvard Medical School and the Deaconess hospital in 1992. Dr. Bach is perhaps most well-known for his description of the mixed lymphocyte reaction. He has also made major contributions in the field of clinical transplantation, bone marrow transplantation, tumour immunology, molecular biology and most recently xeno-transplantation.

Dr. Fritz Bach was born in Vienna in 1934. The Bach family left Vienna in 1939 to escape the Nazis. After nine years in England they moved to the USA. Fritz subsequently attended Harvard College and Harvard medical school and perform his medical residency at New York University Medical Centre. During that residency he met and became close friends with one of his most important mentors, Professor Lewis Thomas.

David Sachs, Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, who has known Dr. Fritz Bach for many years said, “I have always been impressed by how alert and insightful Fritz is in all situations. Unlike many of his colleagues (myself included) I have never seen Fritz fall asleep in a seminar. On the contrary, he is the perpetual student, always alert and taking notes either on a pad or his laptop computer”.