Background
He was born in Skien, and took his examen artium in 1925.
He was born in Skien, and took his examen artium in 1925.
University of Oslo.
The candidate.med. degree at the University of Oslo followed in 1931, and from 1931 to 1933 he worked at various Norwegian hospitals. After starting a specialist education in microbiology in 1933, at the Bacteriological Laboratory of the Norwegian Armed Forces, he took the dr.med. degree in 1936 on the thesis Studies on the Bacterial Flora of the Respiratory Tract in Acute and Chronic Bronchitis, Bronchial Asthma and Lung Gangrene. He spent the period 1937 to 1938 as research assistant on an expedition to Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, and 1939 to 1941 at Columbia University in the United States.
He did not return to German-occupied Norway after the 1940 invasion, but worked in the exiled Norwegian medical corps in Toronto (1941–1943) and London (1943–1945).
After the war, in 1945, he was hired at Rikshospitalet in Oslo, at the department Kaptein West. Wilhelmsen og frues bakteriologiske institutt. He served as the State Physician of Epidemies at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health from 1949 to 1955, then had the position as professor of bacteriology (also called medicinal microbiology) at the University of Oslo from 1955 to 1977.
He spent time from 1964 to 1965 as chief physician at the National Medical Center in Seoul. He has been credited with opening the department for virology during his time as professor
In his own research he concentrated on immunochemistry.
In total he penned 170 academic articles He died in December 2001.
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.