Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Tauber, Alfred I.
Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (review)
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 78, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 751-752

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Alfred I. Tauber - Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (review) - Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78:3 Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78.3 (2004) 751-752 Thomas Söderqvist. Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne. Translated by David Mel Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. xxvi + 359 pp. Ill. $40.00 (0-300-09441-8). This is the first and, probably for some time, the only English biography of Niels Jerne, one of the most important immunologists of our era. Awarded a Nobel Prize in 1984, he made two key theoretical contributions: a natural selection model to explain antibody responses to immune stimulation, and the network hypothesis that radically challenged the notion of self/nonself discrimination as the basis of immunity. The book sets the biographical and scientific stage for the first...