Niels Kaj Jerne

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Niels Kaj Jerne (1950)

Niels Kaj Jerne (born December 23, 1911 in London , United Kingdom , † October 7, 1994 in Castillon-du-Gard (near Nîmes ), Gard , France ) was a Danish physician and immunologist . In 1984 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine .

Live and act

Jerne grew up in England and the Netherlands, where he had studied medicine in Leiden from 1928 . He later continued his studies in Copenhagen , where he got a position as a research assistant at the Danish State Serum Institute. From 1956 to 1962 Jerne was a senior staff member at the World Health Organization in Geneva. Then he was head of the microbiological department at the University of Pittsburgh and from 1966 to 1969 director of the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Frankfurt am Main.

From 1969 to 1980 Jerne was director of the “ Institute for Immunology Basel ”, newly founded by the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche . From 1980 Jerne shifted the focus of his activities to France, where he worked as a consultant at the renowned Pasteur Institute in Paris .

Scientific achievements

In 1984 he and Georges JF Köhler and César Milstein received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine “for theories about the specific structure and control of the immune system ”. With his work, Jerne created the conditions for the production of monoclonal antibodies by fusing immune and tumor cells. In addition, he developed an experimental method for recognizing individual immune cells by transferring the plaque technique of quantitative individual detection of viruses, which was developed by Renato Dulbecco , to the immune system. Jerne's greatest achievement was his network theory , in which he explained the regulated interaction of the numerous cell types of the immune system. In doing so, he paved the way for the genetic elucidation of the great diversity of antibodies in an organism, which ended in the work of Susumu Tonegawa .

Memberships and honors

Jerne was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences . In 1970 he received a Gairdner Foundation International Award . In 1967 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , 1975 to the National Academy of Sciences , and 1979 to the American Philosophical Society . and in 1981 to the Académie des sciences .

literature

  • Berthold Budde (Red.): Harenberg Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners. Harenberg Verlag, Dortmund 2000, ISBN 3-611-00612-2 .
  • Klaus Eichmann : The Network Collective. Rise and Fall of a Scientific Paradigm. Birkhäuser, Basel 2008, ISBN 978-3-7643-8372-5 .
  • Thomas Söderqvist: Science as Autobiography. The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003.

Web links

Commons : Niels Kaj Jerne  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 2, 2016
  2. ↑ Member History: Niels Kaj Jerne. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  3. ^ List of members since 1666: letter J. Académie des sciences, accessed on December 1, 2019 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Jerne, Niels Kaj
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish immunologist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1994
Place of death Castillon-du-Gard (near Nîmes ), Gard , France