George Berci (né Bleier; 14 March 1921 – 30 August 2024) was a Hungarian-American surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, United States and a pioneer in minimally invasive surgeries.
He became a Jewish conscripted laborer for the Hungarians in 1942 and narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz in 1944 on a train near Budapest.
[10][11] In 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution took place, Berci was one of six doctors awarded a two-year Rockefeller Fellowship and he went to Melbourne, Australia.
[3] He was recruited in 1967 to move to Los Angeles and join Cedars-Sinai as a visiting scholar in the Department of Surgery.
[3][7] In 1989, he and John Hunter started national surgical training courses to ensure that surgeons were performing the techniques correctly.