Michael Neuberger

Michael Samuel Neuberger FRS FMedSci (2 November 1953 – 26 October 2013) was a British biochemist and immunologist.[4][5][6][7]

Michael Neuberger
Born
Michael Samuel Neuberger

(1953-11-02)2 November 1953[1]
London, United Kingdom
Died26 October 2013(2013-10-26) (aged 59)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
Alma mater
Spouse(s)Gillian Anne Pyman
ChildrenSaskia
Lydia
Thomas
Benjamin
Awards
Scientific career
InstitutionsLaboratory of Molecular Biology
ThesisTransducing phages for analysis of gene duplications (1978)
Doctoral advisorBrian S. Hartley

Biography

Born in Kensington,[8] Michael Samuel Neuberger was the fourth of five children of Albert Neuberger and Lilian Ida (née Dreyfus). He was educated at Westminster School and then went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, 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 at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. The discussions they had were so stimulating for Neuberger that was drawn back to the LMB in 1980 and remained there for the rest of his career, eventually becoming its deputy director. Earlier, though, César Milstein at the LMB had recommended that Neuberger spent some time learning immunology with Klaus Rajewsky at the University of Cologne; 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.”[9]

Family

Michael Neuberger married Gillian Anne (Gill) Pyman, an Australian doctor, on 6 September 1991.[8] They had four children: Saskia, Lydia, Thomas and Benjamin. He died of myeloma, a cancer of antibody-producing cells, at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, 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."[8]

Some key papers
  • Neuberger MS (1983) Expression and regulation of immunoglobulin heavy chain gene transfected into lymphoid cells. EMBO J 2: 1373–1378
  • Neuberger MS, Williams GT, Fox RO (1984) Recombinant antibodies possessing novel effector functions. Nature 12: 604–608
  • Di Noia J, Neuberger MS (2002) Altering the pathway of immunoglobulin hypermutation by inhibiting uracil-DNA glycosylase. Nature 419: 43–48
  • Harris RS, Sale JE, Petersen-Mahrt SK, Neuberger MS (2002) AID is essential for immunoglobulin V gene conversion in a cultured B cell line. Curr Biol 12: 435–438
  • Petersen-Mahrt S, Harris RS, Neuberger MS (2002) AID mutates E coli suggesting a DNA deamination mechanism for antibody diversification. Nature 418: 99–103
  • Rada C, Wiliams GT, Nilsen H, Barnes DE, Lindahl T, Neuberger MS (2002) Immunoglobulin isotype switching is inhibited and somatic hypermutation perturbed in UNG-deficient mice. Curr Biol 12: 1748–1755

Awards and honours

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1993,[2] “a source of particular pride for his father and a very rare concurrence of father and son as Fellows.”[9] and was awarded their GlaxoSmithKline Prize in 2003. He also received the Novartis 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, Edinburgh. In 2013 Neuberger was appointed a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.[9]

References
  1. "Prof Michael Neuberger, FRS Authorised Biography". Debretts.com. Retrieved 2 December 2013.
  2. "Fellowship of the Royal Society 1660–2015". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 15 July 2015.
  3. "Deceased Fellows 2013". The Academy of Medical Sciences. Retrieved 14 September 2020.
  4. Cattaneo, A.; Sitia, R. (2013). "Remembering Michael S Neuberger (1953-2013)". The EMBO Journal. 32 (24): 3112–3113. doi:10.1038/emboj.2013.251. PMC 3981150.
  5. "Michael_Neuberger Obituary". Medical Research Council. Archived from the original on 8 December 2015.
  6. Rajewsky, K. (2014). "Michael S. Neuberger 1953–2013". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (8): 2862–2863. Bibcode:2014PNAS..111.2862R. doi:10.1073/pnas.1401334111. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3939883. PMID 24532658.
  7. Gearhart, Patricia J.; Kelsoe, Garnett (2014). "A tribute to Michael S. Neuberger". Journal of Clinical Investigation. 124 (1): 3–5. doi:10.1172/JCI74366. ISSN 0021-9738. PMC 3871264. PMID 24382382.
  8. "Neuberger, Michael Samuel". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/107564. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  9. Rada, Cristina (1 January 2014). "Michael S. Neuberger 1953–2013". Nature Immunology. 15: 2. doi:10.1038/ni.2788. S2CID 28370559.
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