Avrion Mitchison

Nicholas Avrion "Av" Mitchison (born May 5, 1928 ) is a British zoologist who made significant contributions to the understanding of immunological reactions in infections, allergies and autoimmune diseases .

Life

Mitchison was born in 1928 to Labor politician Dick Mitchison and his wife, the writer Naomi Mitchison née Haldane. His uncle was the biologist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane and his grandfather the psychologist John Scott Haldane . His older brothers are the bacteriologist Denis Mitchison and the zoologist John Murdoch Mitchison. His children are the cell biologist Tim Mitchison and Hannah Mitchison. He studied zoology at Oxford University . In 1950 he accepted a research fellowship at Magdalen College , Oxford and in 1952 a fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship research in the United States. In 1967 he worked at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in Mill Hill, London on different types of lymphocytes in the immune system. From 1971 to 1991 he was Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London and did research on autoimmune diseases. Mitchison was one of the co-founders and from 1991 to 1996 head of the German Rheuma Research Center Berlin (DRFZ) in Berlin. Today he works at the Department of Immunology, Windeyer Institute of Medical Sciences at University College London Medical School.

Research priorities

• immunological tolerance, immune regulation, immunogenetics
• Tissue transplant, transplant immunity, transplant biology
• Rheumatology , rheumatoid arthritis
• Cell biology

He made significant contributions to the role of T lymphocytes and B lymphocytes in the development of inflammatory rheumatic diseases. He demonstrated that immunity from sensitized donors can be transferred to other individuals.

Awards

• 1967 member of the Royal Society
• 1987 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1990 foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
• 1990 member of the Academia Europaea
• 1991 Foreign member of the Polish Academy of Learning (PAU) in Krakow
• 2001 winner of the Robert Koch Gold Medal (recognition of his life's work in immunological research)

The Avrion Mitchison Prize for Young Scientists is named after him. The prize for rheumatism research has been awarded annually since 1999 by the German Rheumatism Research Center Berlin (DRFZ) for the best experimental, clinical or epidemiological research work in the field of rheumatology. Until 2018, the prize worth 2,500 euros was donated by the Schering Forschungsgesellschaft. Since 2019, the DRFZ Berlin has been awarding the Avrion Mitchison Prize, now amounting to 3,000 euros.

Fonts

• Will we survive? Scientific American (1993)
• Human or microbe: who wins? Spectrum of Science (new edition 2001)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://pau.krakow.pl/Rocznik_PAU/2015_2016/Rocznik_2015_2016_sklad_Czlonkowie_18062016.pdf#page=18
2. ↑ 2. Further information on the Mitchison Prize on the website of the DRFZ Berlin