Bruce Beutler

Origins and early life

Bruce Alan Beutler was born in Chicago on 29 December 1957, the son of Ernest Beutler, a hematologist born in Berlin, and of Brondelle May Fleisher, and from the age of two he grew up in Arcadia, California.

Work and career

All four of his grandparents had come to the United States to escape persecution as Jews, his father's parents, both physicians, leaving Berlin in 1935, and he wrote that he was reminded of this often from an early age. As a teenager he worked in his father's laboratory, graduated from the University of California, San Diego, at eighteen, and took his medical degree at the University of Chicago in 1981. In 1983 he joined Anthony Cerami's laboratory at the Rockefeller University in New York, where he purified cachectin, a factor that immune cells release on meeting bacteria, and found it to be the mouse form of tumor necrosis factor.

In 1986 he moved to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas to lead his own laboratory, and set out to learn how cells sense lipopolysaccharide, the bacterial molecule behind septic shock. He studied two strains of mice that did not respond to it, and on 5 September 1998, after a five-year search, his team identified the gene responsible, Tlr4, a relative of the fruit fly's Toll gene. This Toll-like receptor proved to be the long-sought sensor of lipopolysaccharide, one of those that switch on innate immunity, the body's first line of defense.

In 2000 he moved his laboratory to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, where induced mutations in mice led him to many more genes of host defense.

Recognition

In 2011 he shared one half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jules Hoffmann, “for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity”, the other half going to Ralph Steinman. That year he returned to the Dallas medical center, where he directs its Center for the Genetics of Host Defense.