- Person
- Gerald Edelman
- Lived
- 1929–2014
- Field
- Immunology, neuroscience
- From
- American
The story
Antibodies are proteins the body makes to recognise and fight infections, and by the 1950s they were known to be vital to medicine. Yet nobody knew what they looked like. Gerald Edelman, a young New York doctor, became fascinated by the question while serving as an army physician in Paris, after reading a textbook that said remarkably little about them. In 1957 he joined Henry Kunkel’s laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute to find out.
Antibodies are huge molecules, so Edelman set out to break them into smaller pieces. Guessing that an antibody might be made of several chains held together by sulphur bridges, he used chemicals to break those bonds and split the molecule apart. Working independently in Britain, Rodney Porter cut antibodies with an enzyme. Together their results showed that the commonest antibody is made of two light chains and two heavy chains forming a Y shape, with the binding sites at the tips of the arms.
Edelman found a rich source of pure material in patients with multiple myeloma, a cancer of antibody-producing cells, whose blood is flooded with a single antibody. In 1962, with Joseph Gally, he showed that the mysterious Bence Jones proteins in such patients’ urine are the light chains of their antibody. Through the 1960s his team determined the order of the building blocks in every chain, and in 1969 they published the complete sequence of an entire antibody molecule of more than 1,300 amino acids, at the time the largest protein ever sequenced.
The sequence showed that each chain has a constant region and a variable region, and that the variable regions of a light and a heavy chain fold together to form a unique pocket for one target. That explained how the immune system can recognise an almost unlimited range of invaders. In 1972 Edelman and Porter shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel committee said their work set off research worldwide that yielded results of practical value for clinical diagnosis and therapy.
Why it matters
Knowing the structure of antibodies underpins today’s antibody-based diagnostic tests and the engineered antibody drugs used against cancers, autoimmune diseases and infections.
About Gerald Edelman
Queens-born physician-scientist who worked out the chemical structure of antibodies, the knowledge behind today’s antibody tests and antibody drugs, then turned to the brain. Nobel Prize 1972.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1972 NobelPrize.org
- Gerald M. Edelman: Nobel Prize The Rockefeller University
- Gerald Edelman Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.