George Alberti: A Myriad of Contributions to Diabetes and Beyond.

Abstract

K. George M.M. Alberti Medawar and Pyke, in Hitler’s Gift (1), record the movement out of Germany in the 1930s of world-class academic talent from within the Jewish diaspora. But among the Jewish migrants was one too young yet to show such talent, indeed a mere toddler, escaping with mother and brother as the door closed in 1939. Kurt George Matthew Mayer Alberti was born in September of 1937. His father William Peter (after the family’s names were duly anglicized) was a printer, and his mother Edith Elizabeth was a research physicist before marriage. Mayer-Alberti-Strasse can still in found in Koblenz, but the young George Alberti settled with his family in Gateshead, U.K.; U.K. citizenship was granted to all in November 1946. The northeast of England was clearly a hit with the young Alberti—he returned later in life from the south of England to be professor of Clinical Biochemistry and subsequently professor of Medicine in Newcastle (see below). But as a lad he crossed the River Tyne to Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School, an institution with a strong record for forwarding its pupils to England’s top universities; George went on to Balliol College Oxford. Balliol is perhaps better known as a cradle of high-flying politicians and civil servants, and this may have confirmed George Alberti’s (partly correct) view of his own personality as “laid back, iconoclastic, irreverent” in an interview for The BMJ in 2016 (2). More Cambridge than Oxford in fact. Young George. Left: George and older brother (Peter) with grandparents (Willi and Hedwig Lachmann) in Koblenz, Germany, prior to the family’s move to England. Middle: George as a schoolboy, circa 1947. Right: George and his mother, Edith, circa 1962 Medical students at Oxford usually studied Animal Physiology as an intercalated Bachelor of Arts degree, and it was not unusual …