Michael Samuel Neuberger FRS FMedSci (2 November 1953 – 26 October 2013) was a British biochemist and immunologist.

Biography

Born in

Kensington Kensington is an area of London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, around west of Central London. The district's commercial heart is Kensington High Street, running on an east–west axis. The north-east is taken up by Kensingt ...

, Michael Samuel Neuberger was the fourth of five children of Albert Neuberger and Lilian Ida (née Dreyfus). He was educated at

Westminster School Westminster School is a Public school (United Kingdom), public school in Westminster, London, England, in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. It descends from a charity school founded by Westminster Benedictines before the Norman Conquest, as do ...

and

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

, from where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Natural Sciences in 1974. Neuberger then joined Brian Hartley at Imperial College to study for his PhD. During this time, and at Hartley’s suggestion, he visited the South African biologist

Sydney Brenner Sydney Brenner (13 January 1927 – 5 April 2019) was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to wo ...

at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. Their discussions drew Neuberger back to the LMB in 1980 and he remained there for the rest of his career, eventually becoming its deputy director. César Milstein at the LMB recommended that Neuberger spent some time studying immunology with Klaus Rajewsky at the

University of Cologne The University of Cologne () is a university in Cologne, Germany. It was established in 1388. It closed in 1798 before being re-established in 1919. It is now one of the largest universities in Germany with around 45,187 students. The Universit ...

; he spent 18 months there, after his PhD. Neuberger “was probably most widely known for delineating the role of DNA deamination in immunity through his pioneering work that explained how cytosine deamination drives the somatic hypermutation and class-switch recombination of antibody-encoding genes. Following the identification of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) by Honjo and Durandy as the protein essential for both of those processes, Michael produced a series of seminal papers during 2002 that laid bare the mechanism that had perplexed immunologists for 30 years.”

Family

Michael Neuberger married Gillian Anne (Gill) Pyman, an Australian doctor, on 6 September 1991. They had four children: Saskia, Lydia, Thomas and Benjamin. He died of myeloma, a cancer of antibody-producing cells, at

Addenbrooke's Hospital Addenbrooke's Hospital is a large teaching hospital and research centre in Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county to ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

, on 26 October 2013. "At his request, he was buried in a Jewish consecrated grave in the grounds of the Baptist oratory, next to his family weekend home in Suffolk."

Some key papers

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Awards and honours

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1993, “a source of particular pride for his father and a very rare concurrence of father and son as Fellows.” and was awarded their GlaxoSmithKline Prize in 2003. He also received the

Novartis Novartis AG is a Swiss multinational corporation, multinational pharmaceutical company, pharmaceutical corporation based in Basel, Switzerland. Novartis is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and was the eighth largest by re ...

medal in 2002 and delivered the Novartis medal lecture, entitled "Antibodies: a Paradigm for the Evolution of Molecular Recognition" on 9 April 2002 at

Heriot-Watt University Heriot-Watt University () is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was established in 1821 as the School of Arts of Edinburgh, the world's first mechanics' institute, and was subsequently granted university status by roya ...

, Edinburgh. In 2013 Neuberger was appointed a Foreign Associate of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Neuberger, Michael 1953 births 2013 deaths People educated at Westminster School, London Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Alumni of Imperial College London Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society Members of the European Molecular Biology Organization Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences British biochemists English Jews Jewish British scientists

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English people of German-Jewish descent Deaths from multiple myeloma in England