LONDON — The immunologist César Milstein died in Cambridge, UK, on 24 March aged 74. Milstein, who was born in Argentina, devoted most of his career to studying the structure of antibodies and the mechanism by which antibody diversity is generated. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Georges Köhler, for developing the hybridoma technique for the production of monoclonal antibodies. This was the discovery that allowed the exploitation of antibodies in science and medicine and is now the basis of a multi billion pound industry. Milstein himself went on to develop monoclonal antibodies as markers for particular cell types. He is said to have regretted the fact that the UK government had failed to patent the hybridoma technology.
Milstein joined the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1963, shortly after it opened. The Chief Executive of the MRC, Sir ...
