CÉSAR MILSTEIN, 1927 – 2002

César Milstein was a Nobel Prize winning biochemist who opened new doors in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. In 1984, with Georges Köhler and Niels K. Jerne, he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work in the development of monoclonal antibodies. They are now used in everything from diagnostic tests to the therapeutic treatments of several autoimmune diseases to most recently, as a therapeutic treatment for COVID-19. Drugs in this class make up a third of all new medicines introduced worldwide.

Born in Argentina to an Argentine mother and a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant father, Milstein was not a top student in his early years. But his mother, a teacher, encouraged all three of her children to attend college. Milstein began to excel in his biochemistry graduate studies.

Milstein earned two Ph.Ds. – the first from the University of Buenos Aires, the second from the University of Cambridge. Thereafter, he was a member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.  The major part of Milstein's research career was devoted to studying the structure of antibodies and the mechanism by which antibody diversity is generated. 

Milstein was generous and selfless in working with scientists in poorer countries. He refused to patent his discoveries, as he felt the discovery belonged to humankind.