An unlikely vaccinologist fights an unlikely foe.
By Alan Dove
Gerd Maul was frustrated. It was 1989, and the German-born researcher at Philadelphia's Wistar Institute couldn't develop antibodies to the nuclear pore proteins that had been a focus of his study for nearly a decade. With funding getting tight, he consulted a colleague, Sergio Jimenez, then across the street at the University of Pennsylvania, who worked with patients with the autoimmune disease scleroderma. Maul knew that the human immune system could develop antibodies to very conserved proteins that rabbits (the species he was using) would never develop. So, he asked for samples.
In a cluttered first floor lab undergoing construction, Maul and postdoc Carl Ascoli examined cell nuclei from 1,700 patient sera samples and found something unexpected. Two samples had "funny dots in the nuclei," and suddenly, says Maul, it was like looking into "a star spangled sky." The "nuclear ...
