I was born in 1944 in Riehen, a village near Basel, and
spent almost all of my first twenty-five years with my family in Zinkernagel деревянный Rolf M. подиум акустический полностью - the same house.
My grandfather on my father's side had bought this house in 1918 after moving
with his family from Tübingen to Basel to become Professor of German Literature
at the University of Basel.
My father grew up in Basel, went through the schools
there, and studied biology, finishing with a thesis under the guidance of Prof.
A. Portmann. Portmann was an outstanding zoologist-palaeontologist, with a very
broad perspective on human development seen in an evolutionary context, not
only anatomically, but also psychologically. With this training my father became
the first PhD to be employed by the JR Geigy AG - one of the former four big
pharmaceutical companies in Basel - not as a chemist, but as a biologist. This
in a way heralded a new era of biologically oriented pharmaceutical research
and development.
My mother grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the French-speaking Jura mountains,
raised by parents whose family was in the watch-making business and in banking.
After moving to Basel, my mother became a lab technician and met my father at
work. I was the middle child of three, my brother Peter, born in 1942, became
an architect and my younger sister Anne-Marie, born in 1945, became a lab technician.
I went through public school in Riehen, then in Basel, to the Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliches
Gymnasium, the same school attended by both my father and father-in-law. Since
this school didn't teach Latin as a compulsory subject, which was at the time
still necessary for several disciplines, such as medicine or law, I took four
years of voluntary Latin as well as the school's more mathematically and science-oriented
subjects. During that time I had a great number of hobbies: I was introduced
by a chemist and collaborator of my father's - who is also a gifted painter
- to the prehistory of the Basel region. This was extremely interesting, because
during the last glacial period this area was not covered with ice, so that many
sites of the previous inter-glacial period have survived. At the same time I
also attended several handicraft courses, learning cabinet-making and smithing,
as well as enjoying dancing and going to the mountains with the Swiss Alpine
Club. My father sent my brother and me on a holiday exchange program to England
to learn English. I read a lot and was allowed to do a fair amount of travelling
through England, France and the Scandinavian countries, between the ages of
twelve to sixteen. When I obtained my matura in 1962, I was uncertain as to
what to study. The two areas I favoured were either medicine or chemistry and,
because of the greater range of choices the medical profession could offer,
i.e. research, - Rolf Zinkernagel M. ВВГ Кабель clinical activity, or private practice in the mountains, medicine
was my target for the next 6 years. I first had to acquire my matura in Latin,
however, and in parallel with the medical studies I also had to do my military
service. I somehow managed all this by working hard during the first two or
three years of medical school. During that time I met my wife, Kathrin, who
was studying in the same class, also at the university of Basel. We took our
final exams together, which we had prepared with a very nice group of four medical
students. In November of 1968, two weeks after the final board exams, we got
married. We had originally wanted to go to Africa, where I would have liked
to work and learn about leprosy. We applied to the WHO in Geneva and other international
organisations, but we were not accepted because of our lack of experience. On
the first of January 1969 I began to work at the surgery department at one of
the hospitals in Basel, and Kathrin started at the University of Basel Eye Clinic.
However, within that first year I somehow became aware that surgery might not
be the career l should pursue for the rest of my life and I started to look
around for alternatives. After many discussions about my career with several
researchers (including A. Pletscher, J. Lindenman and many others), to find
another goal, I applied to the postgraduate course in Experimental Medicine
at the University of Zurich. To fill in the time between surgery and this course,
I did some studies on capillary growth in the epiphysis of the long bones in
the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Basel, under the direction of
R. Schenk and U. Riede. The course in Zurich is a unique institution that is
financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the state of Zurich, it
gave some ten medical students from all over Switzerland the opportunity to
learn more about modern science, in particular molecular biology, biochemistry,
genetics, neurobiology and immunology, and to catch up with what had been missed
during medical school. Starting in October 1970, I spent two years in the Department
of Biochemistry at the University of Lausanne, under the direction of H. Isliker,
learning about immunology, immuno-chemistry and the frustrations of experimental
lab work. In Lausanne, I was asked to apply to bacteria a technique that had
been made popular by T. Brunner and then by J. C. Cerottini, the 51Cr
release assay to monitor the destruction of the immunological effector functions
of host cells. This test involved the labelling of cells with a radioactive
isotope, to monitor the immune mechanism destruction of host cells. The process
was measured by determining the relative amount of radioactivity released from
the dying cells. This project proved very difficult and did not produce any
conclusive result: The chromium was not properly absorbed by the bacteria and
this release assay was therefore not easily feasible. Nevertheless some work
was accomplished on the role of IgA, which was obtained from hyperimmunised
cows that release a significant amount of IgA into the colostral milk. I was
evaluating whether such hyperimmune milk products were able to protect in an
ileal loop model against the entrotoxin-releasing entropathogenic E. coli.
This confrontation with an infectious disease and the potential of immune responses
to protect against it, motivated me to look for a second postdoc position in
the same field. Together, Kathrin and I sent about fifty applications to various
labs throughout the world, including ones in the UK, the USA, and in Australia,
but we either got no answer back or only negative ones. At that time we already
had two children and my wife was also trying to find a position to pursue her
own career as an eye doctor.
In 1972, while I was looking around for
positions, H. Isliker discussed my plans
with Professor G. Ada, Head of Department of Microbiology of the John Curtin
School of Medical Research in Canberra at the Australian National University,
and with Robert Blanden, a professorial fellow at the same institution. G. Ada
and H. Isliker were working together at the International Union Against Cancer
in Lyon, and R. Blanden came by to teach at the WHO course on immunology at
our institution, which was hosting the WHO training lab in Lausanne. This juxtaposition
opened up the possibility that I could join the Department of Microbiology in
Canberra with the condition that I brought my own salary. The post-doctoral
fellowship from the Swiss Foundation for Biomedical Fellowships granted me 32'000
SFr. per year for two years to go to Australia. Fortunately Kathrin did not
object to such a drastic move with our two small children Christine, 2 1/2 years,
and Annelies 11 months old. We flew to Canberra in January of 1973. My plan
was to work with R. Blanden on cell-mediated immunity against Salmonella and
Listeria to learn more about the role of cell-mediated versus antibody-dependent
immune effector mechanisms in these infectious disease models. When we arrived
in Canberra we were very lucky and happy to find a generous infrastructure offered
by the Australian National University, which provided us with a detached four-room
family house within a group of some thirty houses lovingly called the "University
ghetto", in Hughes. It provided an extremely nice and congenial environment
for students, young and middle-aged post-doctoral, pre-doctoral and professorial
visitors from all over the world. Kathrin soon found a position as a part-time
physician at the emergency room of the Woden Valley Hospital, the kids found
access to play-groups and kindergarten, I spent all day in the lab studying
immunity to infectious diseases and we made many friends amongst the Hughes
community.
Within the department, the only empty space in the small labs at the John Curtin
School, was in the lab occupied by Peter Doherty. He had arrived as a post-doc
from Edinburgh at the end of 1971, his interests being mostly in inflammatory
processes in the brain, particularly in mice with the Semliki Forest virus or
with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). We started to cooperate on immune
responses against the LCMV virus; he was tapping the cerebral spine fluid and
doing the inflammatory and immunopathological analyses in the brains, while
I was doing the cytotoxicity assays, since I had become familiar with them in
Lausanne. This collaboration resulted not only in the discovery of the MHC restriction,
as will be detailed in our lectures, but also encouraged me to eventually enrol
at the age of 28 as a PhD student at ANU. I had two reasons: one, obviously,
was to add a PhD to the doctorate that I had earned - asian M. Zinkernagel Rolf beastiality with a thesis on free sites M. Zinkernagel free Rolf - 100 top rape the forum Rolf - family bbs Zinkernagel M. incest clinical
- girls Rolf Zinkernagel M. underwear little problems of neuritis M. beastiality asian - Rolf Zinkernagel of the plexus brachialis at the University of Basel. The
second motivation was that the exchange rate of 5.2 Swiss Francs for 1 Australian
dollar made life rather difficult at the time. The PhD scholarship added a welcome
2000 Australian dollars to our budget.
The two-and-a-half years in Canberra were particularly successful because the
group of people that had come together in G. Ada's department (including R.
Blanden, K. Lafferty, A.
Cunningham, P. Pletscher, P. McCullagh and many others),
was just the right mix of investigative, critical if not aggressive, intelligent
if not inquisitive, humorous if not bitter, and enjoyable minds working together
and making sure that one's feeling of being right was constantly questioned
and challenged. Of course, the fact that all these people - or at least most
- worked with biological model situations, either involving infectious diseases
or the transplantation of organs, made all of us very aware that immunology
really had to deal with defence in vivo and not with artificial antigens in
an in vitro setting.
As soon as our first papers were published in Nature I had to look around
for the next post-doctoral or professional situation and was contacted by F.
Dixon of the Scripps clinic in La Jolla, who was looking for an assistant professor
to join Scripps to work on cell-mediated immunity of auto-immune mice; he had
heard from J.C. Cerottini in Lausanne about our work in Canberra. I had also
approached B. Benacerraf at Harvard to find out whether there would be any chance
of working in his Department of Pathology to continue studying infectious disease
immunology. At the second International Congress of Immunology in Brighton in
1974 P. Doherty and I had various opportunities to report on our findings of
MHC restriction. I met with F. Dixon and B. Benacerraf. After several discussions
and because I could no longer continue to work with the virus in the Boston
lab, but also because California, the sea and sun seemed attractive, the decision
to join the lab of F. Dixon in La Jolla was easy.
Our two children were very happy in Canberra and they both spoke the most beautiful
Australian English. Our second daughter, Annelies, however, went through repeated
colds and middle ear infections, one of them causing a near-lethal Haemophilus
influenza meningitis, signalling a selected IgA defect (that turned out to be
transient). On December 9th, 1974 Kathrin gave birth to our Australian son,
Martin, at Woden Valley Hospital, while I was summarising our experiments on
MHC-restricted T cell recognition during the annual meeting of the Australian
Society for Immunology assembled in Canberra.
Kathrin moved back to Switzerland in early January 1975 to spend a few months
with our parents and to get another 6 month's training in ophthalmology, while
I had to write up my PhD thesis and Peter Doherty was sweating to correct my
offences to the English language. So for another 3 months I finished up several
studies in the lab in Canberra and then travelled
through Australia by train
and bus. The two following months in Switzerland were spent by renovating a
16th century house in the Jura mountains with my brother Peter. In early July
1975, we all moved to La Jolla with a green card, i.e. as US-immigrants, to
join the Scripps Clinic of Medical Research. The decision to apply for a green
card was suggested by F. Dixon not only to avoid time restrictions during my
stay in the USA but also because the prospects for finding an interesting job
in Switzerland were virtually nil. Work at Scripps started well, not least because
Alana Althage, one of F. Dixon's technicians, was assigned to me. She has been
helping me ever since by preparing much of the experimental work and by keeping
the lab running for the past 20 years. I continued studying cell-mediated immunity
and LCMV. This virus had also been studied for several years at Scripps by M.B.A.
Oldstone and F. Dixon. We were using experimental surgical techniques to evaluate
whether or not the MHC of the thymus played a role or not in the selection and
expression of the T cell specificity for self. A series of similar data was
obtained by experiments done in parallel by M. Bevan at the MIT. They resulted
in the discovery that the MHC-molecules of the thymus dictated the restriction
specificity of T cells for self-MHC. These results caused major excitement in
the immunological community because they fitted in nicely with what one knew
about the role of thymus in T cell maturation as originally described by J.F.A.P.
Miller in England and in Australia.
My wife worked as a voluntary collaborator at the ophthalmology clinic at Scripps
for about 10 to 20% of her time; she kept her medical skills alive, particularly
in 1978, when she decided to study for - and successfully passed - the US-medical
board exams.
The University of Zurich had approached me in 1976 to look into the possibility
of taking over a position that had been freed in 1975 by Professor G. Zbinden,
Head of Toxicology of the University and the ETH. This division of Experimental
Pathology within the Department of Pathology was an attractive chance to go
back to Switzerland and to start a larger group. Although the Medical Faculty
of the University of Zurich had voted on a finalist for this position sometime
in 1977 and had put me in first position, it took another two years of tough
negotiations with the government before we could move in the fall of 1979. This
required a lot of patience from Kathrin, F. Dixon and all of us; the signed
contract only arrived about 10 days before the planned starting date in Zurich!
For the past 17 years we have lived near Zurich, first in Zollikon, and now
in Zumikon, in a cosy old house with huge woodstoves, a beautiful flower garden
and a handy vegetable plot, chickens, and an Appenzeller dog. Kathrin finished
her ophthalmology specialisation in the first few years, then started up her
own practice. The children adapted reasonably well to schools here and are just
about to finish medical school.
Work in the lab was difficult at first because we had to organise all installations,
equipment and animal quarters for infectious experiments. This was made much
easier when Hans Hengartner, a molecular biologist from the ETH, joined the
lab; he had spent 4 years at the Basel Institute of Immunology. In 1978, he
approached me to plan a possible move together to Zurich. This was another lucky
event in my life, comparable to the moves to Australia and to Scripps; the collaboration
with Hans, first in the division of Experimental Pathology and subsequently
in our Institute of Experimental Immunology, as associate - and eventually as
full professor of both the University and the ETH - has been extremely productive,
exciting, stimulating, straightforward and mutually complementary. Joining our
molecular, immunological and physiological
capabilities and expertise has helped
to achieve far more than either of us could have done alone. Together, we continue
to follow viruses in infected hosts to find out more about how the host immune
system functions and how viruses and immune system have co-evolved.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1996, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1997
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
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