Our immune system does a remarkable job of protecting us against the harmful effects of infectious agents that cause disease. However, every so often this defence mechanism can be made to turn on itself, triggering a violent, often fatal reaction against its host. Understanding how the immune system can be prompted to behave in such…

The 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal for revealing the inner beauty of the nervous system. By developing methods that could colour and highlight its key components, Golgi and Cajal allowed the anatomy of the nervous system to be observed and documented in precise…

by Gunnar Grant This article was published on 12 September 1999. was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine as early as 1901, when the first prize was awarded. After that, his name came up every year until 1906, when he was finally awarded the prize together with . There were four proponents…

The first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine acknowledged both the development of a scientific concept that concerned the way in which the immune system can fight certain infectious agents, and its successful translation into a method of keeping the illnesses they cause at bay. At the forefront of these achievements was Emil von Behring.…

1. Early life and influences I was born in 1945 in Fukuoka, half a year before the end of the World War II, to my father Yoshio and mother Shina. My father was employed at Kyushu University as a professor of mining engineering. At that time, everyone in Japan was equally poor, and even food…

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I was born in Nagoya, Japan on September 5th, 1939, the second of three sons. I have also a younger sister. My father was an engineer working for a textile company that had several factories scattered in rural towns in the southern part of Japan. The company policy made it necessary for my father to…

In 1936, when I was born in the small Silesian village of Waltersdorf in the county of Sprottau in the then eastern part of Germany, now part of Poland, the fine structure of the cell was still an enigma. After 300 years of staring through light microscopes, essentially all that biologists had learned was that…

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