Horst Bickel

Horst Bickel ( born June 28, 1918 in Hamburg, † 1 December 2000 Baabe ( Rügen) ) was a German pediatrician.

Life

As assistant to the Swiss pediatrician Guido Fanconi he described together with this first time in 1949 a rare syndrome characterized by the combination of a pathologically increased storage of starch ( glycogen) in the liver and the kidneys ( glycogen storage disease ), impaired function of the collection tubes in the kidney and a disturbed utilization of the sugar molecules glucose and galactose. The autosomal recessive hereditary disease was later called Fanconi -Bickel syndrome.

In the 1950s, Horst Bickel significantly developed a diet for the treatment of congenital metabolic disease phenylketonuria, proving that the disease is treatable by a reduction of the causative amino acid phenylalanine. After Robert Guthrie had in 1963 developed a screening method for this common congenital metabolic disease, it was thanks to him that this screening was in the 1970s for all newborns in the Federal Republic of Germany to the standard. From 1967 to 1987 Horst Bickel was professor of pediatrics at the University of Heidelberg. In 1973 he was elected a member of the Scholars Academy Leopoldina.