Dennis V. Razis

The Delphi Society organized two Interdisciplinary International Congresses with the participation of prominent Scientists and Nobel Laureates. Since 1996 Delphi Society organized Monthly scientific meetings in Athens on topics related to the social and ecological crises that threaten life on the planet with the 6th mass extinction.

Razis has always maintained a keen interest in the environment as well as a deep Concern for increased population of the earth, which resulted from the rising standards of hygiene as well as advances in medicine, without the corresponding adjustment of the reproductive rate. He became increasingly worried about the possibilities of catastrophic and irreversible damage to the environment, what became known as the sixth mass extinction of life of earth. He founded the Delphi Society of which he presides since 1995. The society is concerned with the biological world view of human behavior and the current issues of modern humanism.

In 1961 he returned to pioneer modernizing Medical Oncology in Greece. He started working as a Scientific Advisor to the newly established Greek Cancer Society and consequently, with a group of U.S. trained physicians, he led the organization of the Cancer Institute of Piraeus where he served as President of the Scientific Committee, member of the Board of Directors, and Director of the First Medical Oncology Clinic in Greece.

In 1954 he travelled to USA, where he worked for the following seven years, in the clinical and research Departments of Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology in leading hospitals such as Illinois Research and Educational Hospital, Cook Country Hospital – in Chicago, Ill., and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Roswell Park Memorial Hospital in New York and Buffalo, NY. respectively.

Razis studied medicine in the University of Athens, graduating in 1948. This was a difficult period for Greece, when occupation and economic collapse were followed, after the war, by protracted and vicious civil war. This period left an indelible mark on the young medical student who still remembers that on the black market a single injection of Penicillin cost one gold sovereign, an enormous sum at the time.

Dennis Razis was born in Argostoli, Kefallonia, Greece, the last of seven children to a middle-class family engaged in trade and agriculture. His father was a merchant and landowner. Before the Second World War, Kefallonia had a rich cultural heritage with distinct music and popular interest in theatre and opera, which the whole family attended regularly. However he was expected to work in his father’s store while he attended school. He finished high school in 1941, at the time of the Italian occupation. He and his older siblings were involved in the popular resistance.

Dennis Vincent Razis (born 30 May 1923) is the first practitioner of formal Oncology in modern Greece. He is also the President of the Delphi Society, an interdisciplinary assembly of philosophers and scientists concerned with the social and ecological crises that threatens life on earth.