Hans Grüneberg

Life & Legacy

Hans Grüneberg (26 May 1907 – 23 October 1982), whose name was also written as Hans Grueneberg and Hans Gruneberg, was a British geneticist. Grüneberg was born in Wuppertal–Elberfeld in Germany. He obtained an MD from the University of Bonn, a PhD in biology from the University of Berlin and a DSc from the University of London. He arrived in London in 1933, at the invitation of J.B.S. Haldane and Sir Henry Dale.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1956. Most of his work focused on mouse genetics, in which his speciality was the study of pleiotropic effects of mutations on the development of the mouse skeleton.
He was the first person to describe siderocytes and sideroblasts, atypical nucleated erythrocytes with granules of iron accumulated in perinuclear mitochondria. This he reported in the journal Nature. The Grüneberg ganglion, an olfactory ganglion in rodents, was first described by Hans Grueneberg in 1973.