Gustav Born, 96; famed medical researcher

Gustav Born, an accomplished medical researcher who was the son of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and was also a witness to the expulsion of famed scientists from Nazi Germany, died April 16 in Britain, where he lived. He was 96.

His death was announced by the William Harvey Research Institute, which Dr. Born helped found. No cause of death could be learned.

Known for his work on blood clotting, Born was a member of an accomplished family: In studying medicine he followed in the footsteps of a grandfather; another family member is his sister’s daughter, singer Olivia Newton-John.

As the son of Max Born, recognized as a founder of modern physics, and of quantum theory in particular, Born met many of the luminaries of 20th-century science while growing up Göttingen, Germany, one of Europe’s leading scientific and academic centers.

He recalled lying under a piano and hearing the music played by one of his father’s colleagues, the Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg.

He knew J. Robert Oppenheimer, who studied in Germany with Dr. Born’s father and later became the leader of the Los Alamos, New Mexico, laboratory that built the first atomic bomb.

“He was quite reserved,” Born told an interviewer from the University of Göttingen in 2011. “Slightly formal.”

Once, when the family was in Britain during World War II, Born recalled that he was sent by his father to a London hotel to deliver a letter to Niels Bohr, another Nobel laureate and a principal figure in the creation of quantum mechanics.

Bohr was on his way to Los Alamos and was traveling under an assumed name. In the letter, Max Born said he would have nothing to do with research on an atomic bomb.

Born’s father, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954, came from a Jewish family but later became a practicing Lutheran. Nevertheless, under the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis, his father’s academic career became circumscribed.

Born remembered his parents discussing what they should do. One of the friends who offered advice was Albert Einstein. In an interview, Born recalled that Einstein said, “Leave at once.”