Melvin Cohn, a cofounder of the Salk Institute who was renowned for his work in immunology and gene regulation, died October 23 in San Diego. He was 96.
“Mel Cohn has been a mainstay of the Institute since its very first days,” Rusty Gage, president of the Salk, says in a press release. “He has stood with Salk through its entire history and all of us will miss his presence and his wisdom.”
Cohn joined the institute in 1961 after a personal invitation from Jonas Salk to work there as a founding fellow and researcher. Over the past 57 years, he studied the body’s immune system, including the evolutionary selection pressures that shape it, and showed that immune cells and antibodies respond directly to infection and pathogen exposure to protect the body. He also developed computer models to predict immune behavior.
“Mel was working on a new paper just yesterday,” ...
