Institutions University of Crete Institution University of Crete Name Demetrios Spandidos | Children Two Spouse Panayota D. Krempeniou Fields Oncology, Virology | |
Born April 13, 1947 (age 77)
Agios Konstantinos, Sparta, Greece ( 1947-04-13 ) Thesis Genetics and transcription of reovirus (1976) Alma mater Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, McGill University, University of Glasgow | ||
Demetrios Spandidos interview on Georgia Bitakou - World Congress on Advances in Oncology 2018
Demetrios A. Spandidos is a Greek virologist and cancer researcher. He has been professor of virology at the University of Crete since 1989. He is also the founder of Spandidos Publications and the editor-in-chief of all eight of its journals.
Contents
- Demetrios Spandidos interview on Georgia Bitakou World Congress on Advances in Oncology 2018
- Education
- Career
- References
Education
Spandidos received his bachelor's degree from the University of Thessaloniki in 1971, his PhD from McGill University in 1976, and a DSc from the University of Glasgow in 1989.
Career
From 1976 to 1978, Spandidos worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, working in the laboratory of Louis Siminovitch. In 1978, Spandidos gave a presentation to a Dana Farber Cancer Institute seminar. In this presentation, Spandidos claimed to have proven that oncogenes were the root cause of all cancers. Robert Weinberg, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was in the audience when Spandidos gave this talk, and later recalled that he had devised what he called "exactly the same" strategy to identify oncogenes in human tumors not long before Spandidos' talk. Spandidos had published these findings in Cell a month prior to Weinberg having his idea, which, like Spandidos' paper, related to transfectable oncogenes.
Spandidos was forced to end his position at the University of Toronto in Siminovitch's laboratory due to accusations of fraud. Two postdocs in Siminovitch lab were unable to reproduce Spandidos' findings, and Spandidos did not present the raw data proving that he was innocent. Unfortunately, Siminovitch did not initiate an independent investigation and the accusations have never been officially confirmed.
From 1978 to 1979 Spandidos was an assistant professor at the Hellenic Anticancer Institute in Athens, Greece. From 1979 to 1989, Spandidos worked at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, where he studied the ras oncogene.
In 1992, Spandidos established Spandidos Publications, a publisher of scientific journals. It currently publishes eight journals: International Journal of Molecular Medicine, International Journal of Oncology, Molecular Medicine Reports, Oncology Reports, Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine, Oncology Letters, Biomedical Reports, and Molecular and Clinical Oncology. Spandidos is the editor-in-chief of all of them. None of the journals are registered in the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).