The death of the molecular biologist from Heidelberg was confirmed by his son Ulrich Franke.

In the early 1990s, Franke and his wife, former GDR athlete Brigitte Berendonk, a shot putter and discus thrower who competed in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, played a key role in uncovering forced state doping in East Germany.

By evaluating documents smuggled out of the Military Medical Academy in Bad Saarow following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he made a significant contribution to the book Doping Documents. From Research to Fraud, which Berendonk published in 1991.

East Germany won over 500 medals in Summer and Winter Olympics from 1968 to 1988, but that quest for dominance had horrific consequences for athletes' health in subsequent years.

The book was an international sensation and helped people around the world understand the depth of the doping system in East Germany, and how athletes were often unwilling victims in it.

Among the cases that came to light thanks to Franke and Berendonk was that of Heidi Kreiger, a shot-putter, who was left with such masculine traits due to the doping regimen she was put on that she eventually underwent sex reassignment surgery and a name change to Andreas.

In the East German case, the blue pill - a steroid called Oral-Turinabol - gained notoriety and Franke unmasked how it resulted in a high level of liver damage.

"Here, we have rapid acute effects such as deepening of the voice, male body [changes] and clitoris enlargement and so forth," Franke once told me of some of the documented effects of anabolic steroids on East German athletes.

"Over the decades, there are severe things like certain types of breast cancer.

“There are also cardiomyopathies, severe heart diseases up to the need to regenerate the whole heart etc.

"It's abuse of science. 

"There's a background of science behind that whole criminality of doping.

"And I say criminality because luckily in a way, we succeeded that these cases went to the criminal court room and there were verdicts and sentences."

Franke remained a fighter against doping in sport for the rest of his life.

"I'm driven and will always remain so," he once said.

"I am clearly an enlightener for the public and an enemy of abusers."

As result of Franke and Berendonk’s work, top East German officials Manfred Ewald and Manfred Höppner received fines and a suspended sentence.

But Franke and Berendonk had to continually defend their work and faced 10 criminal and 12 civil cases - all of which they won.

In 2006, Franke also claimed that cyclist Jan Ullrich purchased about €35,000 (£30,000/$37,000) worth of doping products a year to Eufemiano Fuentes based on documents uncovered in the Operación Puerto doping case.

A German court imposed a gag order on Franke after it claimed there was not enough evidence to link Ullrich to doping.

The case later returned to court with DNA analysis linking Ullrich to nine bags of blood seized in the Puerto case and eventually, after four years, Franke won the case.

For this long-standing fight against doping in competitive sports Franke and Berendonk were awarded the Cross of Merit on ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2004.

Franke was a man of many talents.

During his time as a university student, he was also a track and field athlete and coach, and he even made his mark as a professional satirist.

He performed on stage and wrote texts for famous political cabarets and for television.

Franke died from an intracerebral haemorrhage on November 14.