Michael S. Neuberger 1953–2013

Michael Neuberger’s untimely death on October 26 last year was a shock for his friends and the scientific community. The many obituaries written about him by friends and colleagues testify to his unique, overarching stature as a scientist, colleague, and human companion. I am writing this retrospective mourning a personal friend and irreplaceable loss. Michael Neuberger at the Genetics Institute in Cologne, 1981 (A), and together with the author at a FEBS course on immunology in Croatia in 2007 (B). Michael had been teaching and inspiring young scientists at this biannual summer school for decades. Michael’s father, Albert Neuberger, came from a Jewish family in southern Germany, where he got his education as a biochemist but lost his position shortly after Hitler came to power, and emigrated to the United Kingdom, which became his home country. He pursued a highly successful academic career in Cambridge and London, and became one of the leading biochemists in the country and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society. He and his wife Lilian née Dreyfus had four sons, who all pursued distinguished careers in higher education. Michael, the youngest, studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then did his PhD work in Brian Hartley’s laboratory at Imperial College in London, on gene duplication in bacteria. On the basis of this work, he was elected to a Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and it was there that Michael sought advice from Sidney Brenner at the Medical Research Council laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) about how to pursue his interest in the emerging area of molecular immunology. Sidney referred him to César Milstein (whose mentor at the LMB had been Fred Sanger, a former PhD student of Albert Neuberger), who had developed, with Georges Köhler, the hybridoma technique for the production of monoclonal antibodies, a …