Kurt Benirschke, a pathologist who also conducted pioneering research on animals at the San Diego Zoo, died on Monday (September 10), the zoo announced. He was 94.
“He was insatiably curious,” his son, Rolf Benirschke, tells The San Diego Union-Tribune. “If there’s one trait about my dad that I most admired, it is that he was curious. He always wanted to learn.”
Benirschke was born in a small town in Germany in 1924 and earned his MD at the University of Hamburg before immigrating to the United States in 1949. He did a pathology residency at Harvard Medical School’s affiliated hospitals, and later chaired Dartmouth Medical School’s pathology department for a decade. His research there focused on the placenta and comparative reproductive biology, according to the zoo’s statement.
In 1970, Benirschke took a post as a pathology professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He served as research ...
