MILSTEIN, CESAR

MILSTEIN, CESAR (1927–2002), immunologist and Nobel Prize laureate in medicine. Milstein was born in Bahia Blanca, Argentina. He studied at the University of Buenos Aires and received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1960. From 1961 to 1963, when he emigrated from Argentina to England, he was affiliated with the National Institute of Microbiology in Buenos Aires. From 1963 he was with Cambridge University and in 1981–93 the joint head of the division of protein and nucleic acid chemistry. In 1980 he became head of the molecular immunobiology subdivision. He was the recipient of many awards, including the Wolf Prize in medicine. In 1984 he was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in medicine with George Koehler and Niels Jerne for their research into the body's immunological system and their development of a revolutionary method for producing antibodies, a technique which gave rise to new fields of endeavor for theoretical and applied biomedical research. From 1995 until his retirement in 2002 he was deputy director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.