Henry G. Kunkel, M.D.
Brief Bio
Henry G. Kunkel was the fifty-eighth president of the American Association of Immunologists, serving from 1974 to 1975. Kunkel spent his entire career at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now the Rockefeller University), joining the hospital staff as an assistant resident physician in 1945 and remaining there until his death in 1983.
The son of botanist Louis Otto Kunkel, who headed the Division of Plant Pathology of the Rockefeller Institute for over two decades beginning in 1932, Henry Kunkel received his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins University Medical School in 1942. After completing an internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, Kunkel joined the U.S. Naval Reserves and was called to active duty in 1943. He served as a physician in the European theater, where he treated soldiers with hepatitis during the Allied invasion of Italy, before being reassigned in 1945 to the U.S. Navy Research Unit at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital, which was tasked with investigating hepatitis. Kunkel remained at the Rockefeller Institute after the war, becoming an associate member in 1949. Following one year of study under Arne Tiselius at the Institute of Biochemistry in Uppsala, Sweden, from 1950 to 1951, Kunkel became member and professor of immunology at the Rockefeller Institute in 1952 and senior physician at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital in 1959. He was named the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in 1976 and held the position at the time of his death in 1983.
Lasker Award
1975 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award “for basic contributions to our understanding of immunology and especially immunological mechanisms which are an underlying factor in certain human renal diseases, and in arthritis.” Click here for more details.
AAI Service History
Joined: 1962
President: 1974–1975
Vice President: 1973–1974
Councillor: 1969–1973
Other Service
AAI representitvive to FASEB Board: 1973–1976
AAI representitvive to FASEB Conference Committee: 1976–1977
President's Address
"
Some Questions of Ethics," Delivered April 17, 1975
The Journal of Immunology 115, no. 1 (1975): i-iv.
Awards and Honors
- Gairdner Award, 1962
- Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1967
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1970
- Member, Institute of Medicine, 1970
- Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, 1975
- Avery-Landsteiner Prize (now the Deutscher Immunologie-Preis), 1975
- Academy Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Biomedical Science, New York Academy of Medicine, 1977
- Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Award, National Academy of Sciences, 1979
Institutional/Biographical Links