Felix Milgrom, immunologist and microbiologist par excellence

Abstract

THE Basic Sciences Symposium of The Transplantation Society has become a biennial institution, designed to bring together in a common forum the various basic science disciplines involved in transplantation and related fields. These gatherings have been uniquely successful, but this meeting will, in all likelihood, be the largest and most comprehensive to date. To no small extent, this is due to the special historic role of Buffalo immunology, and of the Ernest Witebsky Center, in shepherding the orderly development of immunology as a major modern discipline. Felix Milgrom is the direct heir to this tradition, which began with Paul Ehrlich and Ludwik Hirszfeld in Europe, and then progressed to Ernest Witebsky in Buffalo. This meeting has been dedicated to Felix Milgrom, and I have been assigned the pleasant task of presenting him to you. Felix Milgrom was born in Poland in 1919, and was educated at the Polish universities of Lwow, Lublin, and Wroclaw (previously Breslau), where he earned the degree of Dozent and his doctorate in Medicine. A period of his medical training took place under Nazi occupation, while he and his family were in hiding, risking their lives daily, because they were Jewish. Felix Milgrom remained at the University of Wroclaw after the war (1946–1954), rising to Professor and Acting Chairman of Microbiology, and Director of the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of the Polish Academy of Sciences. From 1954 to 1957, he was Professor and Chairman of Microbiology at the Silesian University of Medicine. By now, however, Felix Milgrom had served under Soviet rule for eleven years, living through the Lysenko days, and becoming increasingly desperate because of the absolute lack of intellectual or scientific freedom. In 1957, he was permitted to leave Poland and sought employment in Paris. For several months, he worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, in the laboratory of the late Pierre Grabar. This was followed by a brief stint in a Venezuelan blood bank. Milgrom then joined Ernest Witebsky in Buffalo in 1958, and the rest is history. By 1967, he was again a full Professor, and, upon Dr Witebsky’s retirement, Chairman of the Department. Felix Milgrom is a Founder and former Director of the Center for Immunology, and received the highest accolade of the State University of New York in 1981, when he was elevated to the rank of Distinguished Professor. Felix Milgrom has been a leading light in microbiology, immunology and transplantation for a half a century. He has served on all important Federal and State Advisory Committees, and has been the editor or associate editor of numerous major journals. Notably, he served for 26 years as Editor-in-Chief of the International Archives of Allergy and Applied Immunology, and devoted nine years to the Expert Advisory Panel for Immunology of the WHO. He was also a star of the now-legendary NIH Committee for Collaborative Research in Transplantation and Immunology, which provided in 1964 the first major funding to stimulate collaborative HLA studies worldwide. He has been a Councilor and Vice President of The Transplantation Society, and President of the Collegium Internationale Allergologicum. Felix Milgrom has published over 400 major papers in Autoimmunity, Immunopathology, Tumor Immunology, and Transplantation. He has had approximately 80 post-doctoral alumni, representing many nations around the world, and Japan in particular. It is difficult to do justice to Felix Milgrom’s enormous scientific contributions in this short presentation. Suffice it to say that his research has deep roots in the Paul Ehrlich classical School of Immunology (Heidelberg). This began in Poland with his association with the great Ludwik Hirszfeld, a student of Emil von Dungern, in Paul Ehrlich’s laboratory. Witebsky, in turn, had been a laboratory assistant of yet another Ehrlich student, Hans Sachs. These roots received formal acknowledgment by the University of Heidelberg, when they conferred upon Felix Milgrom the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Medicine, with this telling citation: “Following his teachers, Hirszfeld and Witebsky in pursuing the study of immunology, he has contributed to the honor and glory of The Heidelberg School.” Felix Milgrom’s enormous contributions to immunology include a number of important landmarks. He was first to demonstrate that antibodies may have more than two valences, and he introduced the concept of multispecificity, showing that one antibody molecule can have combining sites for various different antigens. In his studies of antibody