Live in Homburg, work in Hamburg

Week after week, the 59-year-old medical professor Dr. Axel Geiner took the 600-kilometer train journey to his workplace in Hamburg because he loves his home in the idyllic wine-growing village of Homburg at the foot of the Kallmuth vineyards more than anything. The Hanseatic city is his professional center. The Homburg doctor works at the Hamburg-West Pathological Institute and researches the possibilities of healing breast cancer tumors.

Even when he relaxes at home with his family in a comfortable armchair in the Homburg Gebsattel Castle, he is reminded of his job. Then he sits under a large portrait of Dr. Mildred Scheel, wife of former Federal President Walter Scheel and founder of the German Cancer Aid. Her foundation, together with other organizations, supported the Pathological Institute of the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg with significant financial resources, where Greiner had worked for a long time.

Head of the Pathological Institute

Axel Greiner is currently the medical director of the Pathological Institute Hamburg-West with a focus on breast cancer research. He is particularly proud that the files of 15,000 patients are currently available to him for his specialty. The search for modern forms of therapy is a “very exciting activity,” says the Homburg specialist. Depending on the type of breast cancer tumors, a safe cure is already possible in some cases today.

Greiner started his career in the 1980s at the Julius Maximilian University in Würzburg. In Würzburg, among other things, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the early development of human embryos. He cites the internationally renowned “Virchow Prize for Pathology” as his greatest success.

After completing his basic training in Würzburg, he applied for a vacant professorship at the University of Heidelberg, which is one of the top ten European universities. The jurors gave him the “best professional profile”. He was appointed professor by the former Baden-Württemberg Minister of Education, Annette Schavan. The work published under Axel Greiner’s leadership in the national and international arena had been certified by the German Society for Pathology as “a high quality and variety”. Greiner’s articles have appeared in the well-known American journals “blood” and “American Journal of Pathology” as well as in the English journal “lancet”.

In Neckarstadt, Axel Greiner also met Professor Özlem Tureci and Dr. Ugur Saleni, who was able to start an incredible success story in Mainz with the founding of “BionTech” and today has an estimated fortune of almost six billion euros. During a short small talk, the Homburg doctor was asked whether he might be interested in working for you? Greiner declined because of his job at the time, after all he had “lost his heart in Heidelberg” professionally.

Before moving to Hamburg, he was deputy head of the Bone Marrow Consultation Center at the University of Hanover. Today he is responsible for the medical management of the Pathological Institute in Hamburg-West.

Born in Essen

Axel Greiner was born in Essen and has lived with his family in Homburg’s Gebsattel Castle since 1998, the landmark of the wine village with a view of the Kallmuth vineyards and the Main Valley. He met his wife Linda, an artist with an international reputation and successful operator of a printing workshop, during a Christmas visit to his sister Andrea, who also has a doctorate in medicine. The couple have two daughters, Pauline (18) and Emma (15).

Axel Greiner commutes week after week with the ICE from Würzburg to Hamburg and back. So far he has had no complaints about the punctuality of the train connection. Recently, however, the train that connects Hamburg with Munich got stuck “behind Hanover on the open route” because the railcar suddenly suffered damage. An “emergency evacuation” only took place for the passengers two and a half hours later. The passengers were taken to Hanover by train. From the Lower Saxony capital, another train went to Würzburg, arriving “after midnight”.

–