Hans-Joachim Born

Who is Hans-Joachim Born?

Hans-Joachim Born was a German radiochemist trained and educated at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie. Up to the end of World War II, he worked in Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timofeev-Resovskij's Abteilung für Experimentelle Genetik, at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung. He was taken prisoner by the Russians at the close of World War II. After rescue from the Krasnoyarsk PoW camp, he initially worked in Nikolaus Riehl’s group at Plant No. 12 in Elektrostal’, Russia, but at the end of 1947 was sent to work in Sungul' at a sharashka known under the cover name Ob’ekt 0211. At the Sungul' facility, he again worked in a biological research department under the direction of Timofeev-Resovskij. Upon arrival in East Germany in the mid-1950s, Born became the director of the Institut für Angewandte Isotopenforschung in Buch, Berlin. He also completed his Habilitation at the Technische Hochschule Dresden, where he then also became a professor on the Fakultät für Kerntechnik. In 1957, he received and accepted a call to become a professor of radiochemistry at the Technische Hochschule München in West Germany.