Gerald M. Edelman
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Gerald M. Edelman
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1972
Born: 1 July 1929, New York, NY, USA
Died: 17 May 2014, La Jolla, CA, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA
Prize motivation: “for their discoveries concerning the chemical structure of antibodies”
Prize share: 1/2
Work
Our immune system protects us from attacks by microorganism and poisons, in part through formation of antibodies in the blood that neutralize foreign substances. Gerald Edelmann and Rodney Porter separately researched the chemical composition of antibodies. Using various chemical methods, they split up antibodies into smaller parts and mapped their biological effects. In 1959, this allowed them to determine the structure of antibodies. Antibodies are made up of two smaller and two larger polypeptide chains that form a Y-shaped structure.
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