Jerne, Niels Kaj

▪ 1995

      British-Danish immunologist (b. Dec. 23, 1911, London, England—d. Oct. 7, 1994, Castillon-du-Gard, France), was a corecipient—with César Milstein and Georges Köhler—of the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his theories of immunology and the effect they had on research. These theories proposed that the body uses a preexisting, immensely diverse repertoire of antibodies to recognize invading organisms and other foreign substances and provided explanations for the way the immune system develops and for the system of interactions in which the immune system is activated when it is needed and then is inactivated. Jerne grew up in Denmark and was educated first in The Netherlands, studying physics at the University of Leiden, and later at the University of Copenhagen, from which he received his medical degree (1951). From 1943 to 1956 he was a researcher at the Danish State Serum Institute, and he then spent six years (1956-62) as the chief medical officer of the World Health Organization. Jerne taught biophysics at the University of Geneva (1960-62), was chairman of the microbiology department at the University of Pittsburgh, Pa. (1962-66), and was professor of experimental therapy at J.W. Goethe University and director of the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (1966-69). He then served (1969-80) as director of the Basel (Switz.) Institute for Immunology, which he helped establish, and taught (1981-82) at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Jerne was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

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