Prof. Paul Ulrich Unschuld
Paul U. Unschuld, born 1943, is Professor and Director of the Institute for Chinese Life Sciences, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
He graduated from the School of Pharmacy, Munich University, and earned a Ph.D. in Chinese Studies and Political Sciences (Munich University) and a Master of Public Health (M.P.H.) from the School of Hygiene and Public Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, where he began his academic career in the Departments of Behavioral Science and International Health. He spent about a year around 1969–1970 on Taiwan studying the contemporary reality of TCM. In 1976 he served as a member of the US delegation at the WHO convention in Geneva, participating in discussions on attitudes toward Traditional Medicine.
From 1986 through 2006 he was director of the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine, Medical School, University of Munich, before accepting an invitation to move to Berlin. His life-long research has focused on the comparative history of Chinese and European medicine and pharmacy — history of ideas, pharmaceutical knowledge, and English translation of core texts of pre-modern Chinese pharmaceutical and acupuncture literature. Since 1978 he has continuously served as consultant to the German government on health-policy collaboration with the PR of China, and was a member of German Chancellor Dr. Merkel’s final cabinet delegation to Beijing in 2018.