Sigi Ziering

By the time of Ziering's death, the company had 1700 employees and marketed more than 400 immunodiagnostic tests.

Sigi Ziering (March 20, 1928 – November 12, 2000) was a German-born American business executive, scientist, playwright, and philanthropist.

Siegfried Ziering was born on March 20, 1928, in Kassel, Germany.

He was the son of Isaac Ziering and Cilly Ziering (née Frisch); his father was Polish.

He had a brother, Herman.

His family was Jewish.

During World War II, his father escaped to England, but his mother and her two sons stayed in Germany.

In 1941, the Nazis forced them to move to the Riga Ghetto in modern-day Riga, Latvia, alongside 1,000 Jews.

Only twenty survived, including Sigi, his mother and his brother.

By the end of the war, they were moved to a prison in Fuhlsbüttel.

The Nazis took 10 Jews a day to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

They were later moved to the concentration camp in Kiel and forced into slave labor.

In 1945, they were rescued by the Swedish Red Cross.

Indeed, Count Bernadotte of Sweden had negotiated with Himmler to rescue a few thousand Jews for a few million dollars.

They were first moved to Sweden and eventually to London, where they rejoined their father.

Ziering immigrated to New York City with his family in 1949.

In 1953, he received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Brooklyn College.

A Holocaust survivor, he immigrated to the United States with his family, earned a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1958, and worked for a time as an industrial physicist.

He was admitted to Syracuse University for graduate work, and received his doctorate in 1958 for a thesis in theoretical physics.

He started his career at Raytheon, where he worked on nuclear reactors in Boston.

He then worked for Allied Research on space projects.

In 1961, he was the founder and President of Space Sciences, Inc., a government contract research firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts.

In 1968, the company was acquired by the Whittaker Corporation for US$1.8 million, which made Ziering "well-to-do".

He and his family relocated to Los Angeles, California, where he was a research director at Whittaker.

In 1970 he left Whittaker and founded a fish meal company, but the business failed.

In 1973 he became president of the Diagnostic Products Corporation, a tiny startup company that was developing advanced tests used for medical diagnosis.

In 1973, Ziering learned of the work of a chemist, Robert Ban, who had developed radioimmunoassay techniques for detecting very low levels of drugs, hormones, etc. in bodily fluids.

Ban had founded a company, Diagnostic Products Corporation, that manufactured and distributed kits.

Ziering invested $50,000 into the company, and became its president.

Ziering subsequently bought out Ban, and Ziering's wife Marilyn Ziering joined the company as vice-president.

In 1976, with his wife, he endowed a program at the Sheba Medical Center to screen all children born in Israel for hypothyroidism, thus saving more than 2,000 Israeli children from mental retardation.

He also served on the board of trustees of the American Jewish University in Bel Air and as co-chair of the Los Angeles section of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The company went public in 1982.

Ziering wrote a play entitled The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff that was first performed in September 1999.

In 2000, the company had about 1700 employees and was marketing 400 immunoassay tests along with the associated instrumentation.

In 2006, the company was acquired by Siemens for 1.86 billion dollars (US) and became a subsidiary, of Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics.

In later life, Ziering was an active philanthropist in Los Angeles, California.

In 2006, the company was acquired for $1.86 billion by Siemens, becoming the subsidiary Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics.

He was a philanthropist to Jewish causes.

Indeed, he was President of Temple Beth Am.