Nobel lecture in physiology or medicine--1987. Somatic generation of immune diversity.

Abstract

One day in the fall of 1970, I received an airmail letter from Renato Dulbecco who was traveling in Europe. At that time I was a postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory at the Salk Institute. The letter, written on stationery of the Hotel Hassler in Rome, said: "Dear Susumu, I don't know what arrangements you have made for after your departure from La Jolla at the end of the year but I would like to mention to you another possibility. The Institute of Immunology in Basel, Switzerland will start operating in a month. They already have an excellent collection of immunologists, but have not yet built an adequate background in molecular biology. I talked about you to Niels Jerne, the Director, and they are interested in having you there... .There are many immunologically interesting phenomena obtained with crude RNA preparations but they are unreliable because RNA is not characterized. In general, it seems the best system for understanding development at a molecular level and you may like to get into such a field. If you are interested, write to Niels K. Jerne, Basel Institute for Immunology, 487 Grenzacherstrasse ..." Thanks partly to this remarkably prophetic letter and partly to the U.S. immigration law that prevented me from remaining in the U.S.A., in February 1971 I found myself in this cozy Swiss town almost completely surrounded by immunologists. For someone who had had no formal training in immunology whatsoever and had never visited Switzerland, it was a rather drastic change. Indeed, the first twelve months at the Basel Institute were not easy. After I arrived in Basel I initially attempted to continue the project of my days in Dulbecco's laboratory, namely, the transcriptional control of the simian virus 40 genes. However, I soon realized that this was not a subject that aroused great interest in an institute almost entirely staffed by immunologists nor one that allowed me to take full advantage of my many talented colleagues. I therefore decided to learn immunology by talking to them, reading papers, and asking questions. An immunologist, Ita Askonas, and a geneticist, Charlie Steinberg, became my tutors and were most helpful to me in getting into a new field. It was during this process that I was introduced to the problem of the origin of antibody diversity. THE PROBLEM