Immunologist Herman Eisen dies at 96
Photo courtesy of MIT
Herman Eisen, MD, a respected immunologist, has died at the age of 96.
Over a 70-year career, Dr Eisen contributed a great deal to his own field and other fields of research.
He published work describing affinity maturation, clarified the basis for certain allergic reactions, and provided new insight into multiple myeloma and other cancers.
Dr Eisen was a professor emeritus of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a founding member of the MIT Center for Cancer Research (now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research).
He joined MIT in 1973 and retired in 1989, but only in the official sense. As a professor emeritus, he maintained an active lab and continued to research, publish, and advise students and postdocs at MIT until his passing.
Early years
Born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, Dr Eisen developed a keen interest in science at an early age, when a high school chemistry class helped frame his perception of the world as a collection of atoms and molecules.
Dr Eisen began premedical studies at New York University (NYU) in 1934, but halfway through his undergraduate career, he developed tuberculosis and left school. Though this kept him out of school for one year, the illness sparked a curiosity about the immune system that would endure for the rest of his life.
Dr Eisen returned to NYU to complete his bachelor’s degree, then enrolled at the university’s medical school. He graduated with an MD in 1943 and then worked as an assistant in the pathology department at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons before going back to NYU for his residency.
Research interests
Dr Eisen had a strong interest in basic science research, particularly in trying to better understand the body’s immune system. Though career options for physician-scientists had historically been limited, the federal government began to increase its funding of biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) following World War II.
Seizing these new opportunities, Dr Eisen became one of the first recipients of an NIH fellowship, which supported his research on sulfonamide-induced antibodies at NYU. These investigations helped him and colleague Fred Karush, PhD, determine the number of antigen-binding sites on antibodies.
After his 2-year NIH fellowship, Dr Eisen worked briefly at the Sloan Kettering Institute before returning once again to NYU as a faculty member.
Inspired by the work of his recently deceased role model, Karl Landsteiner, MD, Dr Eisen studied immune reactions of the skin. In doing so, he clarified the basis for certain allergic responses and showed that only those chemicals capable of forming covalent bonds to skin proteins could cause a characteristic itchy rash.
In 1955, Washington University in St Louis recruited Dr Eisen to join the faculty of its School of Medicine. There, he served as dermatologist-in-chief for 5 years before moving to the Department of Microbiology to serve as chair.
While at Washington University, Dr Eisen published groundbreaking research in which he described affinity maturation: the process by which activated B cells produce antibodies with an increasingly higher affinity for invading pathogens after infection. This process is fundamental to the development of potent immune responses.
“Our understanding of affinity maturation begins with Herman’s papers,” said Arup K. Chakraborty, PhD, director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.
“Understanding this evolutionary process is critical for vaccine design, and affinity maturation is also mimicked in countless academic laboratories and companies to design antibody-based therapies.”
