Ewald Weibel

Ewald Weibel was a Swiss anatomist and physiologist who spent most of his career in Bern. Born in 1929 and trained in medicine at the University of Zurich, he worked for several years in the United States at Yale, Columbia and the Rockefeller Institute before returning to Zurich and then taking the chair of anatomy at the University of Bern, where he directed the Institute of Anatomy until 1994 and served as rector in the mid 1980s. He is best remembered as one of the first scientists to describe the endothelial organelles now called Weibel-Palade bodies, a discovery that began as an accidental observation in 1962, and for his long programme of work on the structure of the lung, using stereology and morphometry to measure how the lung is built for gas exchange. He later led the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences and the International Union of Physiological Sciences. He died in 2019.