lit a candle 4h agoSaw a clip explaining how his lab work fed into the mRNA vaccines. Called my dad, told him about it, he just said 88 years is a good long run for a man who did that much good.
Their story
Günther Jung was a German chemist whose laboratory at the University of Tübingen helped shape modern peptide chemistry, combinatorial synthesis, and the early science behind messenger RNA vaccines. Born in Tübingen on 2 September 1937, he spent nearly his whole career in the city where he had trained, building a…
Günther Jung was a German chemist whose laboratory at the University of Tübingen helped shape modern peptide chemistry, combinatorial synthesis, and the early science behind messenger RNA vaccines. Born in Tübingen on 2 September 1937, he spent nearly his whole career in the city where he had trained, building a school of organic chemistry and biochemistry that linked natural-product structure to immunology and drug discovery.
After a diploma in 1965 and a doctorate in 1967 at Tübingen, Jung spent 1967 to 1968 as an assistant professor at the University of Houston. He returned to Tübingen, gained the right to teach organic chemistry and biochemistry in 1971, and held a permanent professorship from 1973 until 2002. Alongside university teaching he directed the biochemistry department at the Research Institute of Natural and Medicinal Sciences and the Steinbeis Transfer Center for Bioorganic Chemistry, served on advisory boards of scientific journals, and advised pharmaceutical research.
His group worked across structure elucidation and synthesis of natural products, peptide hormones, biosensors, and combinatorial chemistry. With students and collaborators he helped establish methods for mapping MHC-bound peptides that became central to understanding cellular immunity, and he contributed to the chemistry of lantibiotics and other peptide antibiotics. In the mid-1980s his laboratory presented lipopeptide vaccine approaches, including work toward protective responses against foot-and-mouth disease and early demonstrations of virus-specific cytotoxic T-cell responses induced by lipopeptides.
Jung cofounded the European Peptide Society and the European Society of Combinatorial Sciences. With postdoctoral colleagues he helped launch Tübingen biotech ventures, among them EMC microcollections. Two of his former doctoral students, Ingmar Hoerr and Florian von der Mülbe, went on to cofound CureVac. Hoerr's thesis work on RNA vaccines for inducing specific cytotoxic T-lymphocytes and antibodies became part of the scientific background for CureVac's later messenger RNA programs in oncology and infectious disease. Jung authored or co-authored more than 900 scientific publications and several reference books on combinatorial and organic chemistry.
His awards included the Max-Bergmann Medallion (1989), the Leonidas Zervas Award of the European Peptide Society (1992), the Akabori Memorial Award of the Japanese Peptide Society (2000), and the ESCS Award (2003). More than 120 scientists completed doctoral theses in his laboratories. Günther Jung died on 30 June 2026, aged 88. A memorial page on Südwest Presse Trauer recorded the dates and drew notices in the Schwäbisches Tagblatt in July and August 2026.
Biography adapted from English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); Südwest Presse Trauer memorial (Günther Jung); University of Tübingen AK Jung pages.
Photos
1Günther Jung in 2019
by People Forever
Didn't know about the CureVac link either till today.