Geoffrey W. Hoffmann, (born October 20, 1944) is an Australian-Canadian

theoretical biologist Mathematical and theoretical biology, or biomathematics, is a branch of biology which employs theoretical analysis, mathematical models and abstractions of living organisms to investigate the principles that govern the structure, development a ...

. Hoffmann was a faculty member in the Department of Physics at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

and the founder of Network Immunology Inc. in Vancouver, Canada. He is best known for symmetric immune network theory.

Education and early research

Hoffmann studied physics at the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state ...

then obtained a PhD at the

Technische Universität Braunschweig TU Braunschweig (, unofficially ''University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology'') is the oldest ' (comparable to an institute of technology in the American system) in Germany. It was founded in 1745 as Collegium Carolinum and is a membe ...

as a student of

Manfred Eigen Manfred Eigen (; 9 May 1927 – 6 February 2019) was a German biophysical chemist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions. Eigen's research helped solve major problems in physical chemistry and ...

for research done at the

Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry The Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (), also known as the Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer Institute (), was a research institute of the Max Planck Society, located in Göttingen, Germany. On January 1, 2022, the institute merged with ...

in Göttingen. His initial work in theoretical biology addressed

Leslie Orgel Leslie Eleazer Orgel FRS (12 January 1927 – 27 October 2007) was a British chemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, known for his theories on the origin of life. Biography Leslie Orgel was born in London on . He received his ...

's paradox in

origin of life Abiogenesis is the natural process by which life arises from abiotic component, non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to organism, living entities on ...

theories. Hoffmann showed that an early sloppy translation machinery can be stable against the error catastrophe envisaged by Orgel and provided analyses of the expected occurrence of required catalytic activities and exclusion of disruptive catalytic activities. These calculations support the view that the origin of replication and metabolism together is plausible.

Immune network theory

Hoffmann subsequently joined the

Basel Institute for Immunology The Basel Institute for Immunology (BII) was founded in 1969 as a basic research institute in immunology located at 487 Grenzacherstrasse, Basel, Switzerland on the Rhine River down the street from the main Hoffmann-La Roche campus near the Swiss-G ...

, where

Niels Jerne Niels Kaj Jerne, FRS (23 December 1911 – 7 October 1994) was a Danish immunologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Georges J. F. Köhler and César Milstein "for theories concerning the specificity in dev ...

had proposed that the immune system is a network, consisting of antibodies and lymphocytes that recognize not only things that are foreign to the body, but also each other.

Immune network theory The immune network theory is a theory of how the adaptive immune system works, that has been developed since 1974 mainly by Niels Jerne and Geoffrey W. Hoffmann. The theory states that the immune system is an interacting network of lymphocytes and ...

became, and remains, Hoffmann's primary research focus. He developed the symmetrical immune network theory based on Jerne's hypothesis. This theory involves symmetrical stimulatory, inhibitory and killing interactions, and is a framework for understanding, using a small number of postulates, a number of immunological phenomena that are not readily explained otherwise.

Application to HIV pathogenesis

Because symmetrical immune network theory offers a novel model of

HIV The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of '' Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the im ...

pathogenesis, Hoffmann and his lab at the University of British Columbia contributed basic research relevant to the search for an HIV vaccine. Achievements included the co-discovery of "second symmetry", a co-study on antibodies made in a normal immune response that bind both to foreign invaders and to antibodies with the same specificity, and the discovery, with others, that mice immunized with foreign lymphocytes make anti HIV antibodies.

Neural networks

Hoffmann noted many similarities between the immune system and the brain, including that: * both systems have memory and are able to respond appropriately to a wide range of stimuli * both networks consist of comparable numbers of cells, and * both systems have a profound sense of self. The analogy resulted in the discovery of a neural network in which neurons exhibit hysteresis and thus can learn without synaptic modification. He also discovered, with Davenport, a way to add hidden neurons to Hopfield neural networks and thus extend their associative memory capacity.

Network theory of war

Hoffmann proposed G. W. Hoffmann (1987) A Theory of War and a Strategy for Peace. Security Dialogue (formerly Bulletin of Peace Proposals), 18, 93-98 that wars are enabled by selective processes that influence how individuals advance within societies. He argues that such processes occur in all societies, democratic or not, and can be counteracted by increased contact between individual citizens across national or cultural divides.

References