César Milstein
César Milstein ( born October 8, 1927 in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, † March 24, 2002 in Cambridge, England) was an Argentine molecular biologist.
Milstein grew up as the second of three sons of a Jewish immigrant and a teacher up in modest circumstances. Nevertheless, his parents allowed him to study chemistry at the University of Buenos Aires, which he completed after a period of seven years in 1952 with a diploma. In his time as a politically active student, he met his future wife, Celia, whom he married after his graduation. After an interruption of studies, while for a few months, he worked on a kibbutz in Israel and Others, he received his doctorate in 1957 at the Medical College of the University of Buenos Aires in chemistry with a theme for the enzymatic kinetics of aldehyde dehydrogenase. From 1957 to 1963 he was a member of the Instituto Nacional de microbiologia in Buenos Aires, of which he was 1961-1963. Meantime he worked postdoktoral at the Faculty of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge in England, where he worked on the properties of the enzyme phosphoglucomutase. This he learned Frederick Sanger know in whose group he worked 1960-1961. From 1963 Milstein was, together with Sanger for scientific staff of the newly founded Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge. Sanger encouraged Milstein to move his scientific focus on immunology. In 1983 Milstein was Head of the Department for protein and nucleic acid chemistry at Cambridge.
Most of his scientific career Milstein was devoted to the structural analysis of antibodies as well as the mechanisms that are responsible for the high diversity of these immunoglobulins. In this context, he developed in 1975 together with Georges Kohler JF, the hybridoma technique of producing large amounts of monoclonal antibody was facilitated by fusion of a myeloma cell line with a B- lymphocyte. This discovery led to an enormous expansion in the use of antibodies in science and medicine. In 1984 he was awarded for this work Niels Kaj Jerne, together with Georges JF Köhler and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He received numerous other awards, including the 1979 Avery - Landsteiner Prize, 1980 Robert Koch Prize, the Wellcome Prize and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the 1981 Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize and a Gairdner Foundation International Award, 1982, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, in 1983 Carlos J. Finlay prize - UNESCO and the 1984 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In addition, he was elected in 1982 as a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
César Milstein died 74 years old at the consequences of chronic cardiac insufficiency. The asteroid ( 11776 ) Milstein was named after him on May 1, 2003.