Niels Kaj Jerne

Niels Kaj Jerne was an immunologist, born in London on 23 December 1911 to Danish parents and dying in Castillon-du-Gard, France, on 7 October 1994. He studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen and later directed the Basel Institute for Immunology, after earlier posts at the Danish State Serum Institute and the World Health Organization. He shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Georges Köhler and César Milstein for theories on the specificity of development and control of the immune system and for the principle behind monoclonal antibody production. In 1955 he proposed that the immune system works by selection among antibodies already present, and in 1974 he put forward a network theory in which antibodies can attach to other antibodies.