César Milstein

Origins and early life

César Milstein was born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, on 8 October 1927, to Máxima Vanarks and Lázaro Milstein, a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and took his doctorate there before moving to the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; he took British citizenship and held both nationalities for the rest of his life.

Work and career

His subject was the antibody: how it is built, and how a body can produce a distinct one for almost any intruder it has never met. In 1975, with Georges Köhler, a postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory, he found how to make a cell line that produces a single antibody for ever — fusing an antibody-making cell with a tumour cell to get a hybridoma, immortal and specific. Monoclonal antibodies became a basic tool of diagnosis and, later, a class of drugs.

He and Köhler took out no patent; Milstein held that science keeps its promises only when the benefits reach the world's poor. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984, and had the Wolf Prize and the Horwitz Prize in 1980 and the Copley Medal in 1989. He died in Cambridge on 24 March 2002.