Werner Bartens (born 11 July 1966 in Göttingen) is a German physician, historian, science journalist and non-fiction author.
Werner Bartens was born the second child of Werner Bartens and his wife Luise, née Marienhagen, in Göttingen and grew up in Niedernjesa. He attended primary school in Reinhausen and then the Hainberg-Gymnasium in Göttingen, where he graduated from high school in 1985. From 1985 to 1993, Bartens studied medicine, history, and German at the universities of Giessen, Freiburg, Montpellier, and Washington D.C. In the fall of 1988, he completed a clinical internship in the emergency department at the Royal Infirmary in Cardiff, Wales. In 1991, he completed clinical internships at the University Hospital of Freiburg, the Urban Hospital in Berlin, and in cardiology at the Bad Krozingen rehabilitation center. In 1992, he received his medical degree and subsequently worked as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
In 1993 he passed the German state examination in medicine at the University of Freiburg and received his doctorate there in the same year under Christoph Wanner with a thesis on lipid metabolism disorders in nephrotic syndrome with special emphasis on lipoprotein(a). In 1995 he also received his master’s degree in history and German studies in Freiburg with a thesis supervised by Gerd Krumeich on racial theories in the 19th and 20th centuries.[1] After working as a doctor at the university hospitals in Freiburg and Würzburg, he held a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in the research group of Nobel laureate Georges Köhler. From 1997 onwards, Bartens worked as an author, translator, freelance journalist and editor for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, die tageszeitung and the Badische Zeitung. Since 2005 he has been an editor in the science department of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and since 2008 he has been editor-in-chief.
In addition to his journalistic work, he has published numerous books with a total circulation of 1 million copies, which have been translated into 14 languages. Some of them, such as “Body Happiness,” “The Doctor Hater Book,” and “The Encyclopedia of Medical Errors,” quickly became bestsellers, some of them remaining on the bestseller lists for months. He has received numerous journalism awards for his publications, including several Science Journalist of the Year awards.
He also became known to a wider public through appearances on talk shows on German and Austrian television.
Bartens lives near Munich.
Portrait SZ Süddeutsche Zeitung
