Gerald Edelman

Origins and early life

Gerald Edelman was born on 1 July 1929 in Ozone Park, Queens, and was born into a Jewish family in New York: his father Edward was a physician, his mother Anna Freedman worked in insurance.

Work and career

He studied the violin for years before deciding he lacked the inner drive of a concert player, and turned to medicine instead — John Adams High School, then Ursinus College, then an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1954. It was while serving with the US Army Medical Corps in France that a book on antibodies caught him; finding it said very little, he resolved to go and find out, and joined the Rockefeller Institute in 1957 for a doctorate in physical chemistry.

Antibodies were then known to be very large molecules and almost nothing else. Edelman broke the disulphide bonds that hold them together and showed that the molecule is not one piece but four chains, two heavy and two light, arranged so that the variable ends can be shaped to fit an intruder while the constant end signals the rest of the immune system. Working in parallel with Rodney Porter in London, he had by the early 1960s the full chemical structure, and the two shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

He then turned to the question of how a body knows its own shape, discovered the cell adhesion molecules that guide cells into tissues, and found that the gene behind the neural one is the ancestor of the entire adaptive immune system.

Later years

He founded the Neurosciences Institute in California, wrote a series of books arguing that consciousness arises from a Darwinian competition among groups of neurons, and died on 17 May 2014.