In the fall of 1999, a colleague at Berkeley, Graham Fleming, invited me to lunch with a newly arrived postdoc who was exploring immunology—a new field for him. My research couldn’t have been less related: theoretical problems in polymer physics and catalytic materials. But, one of Graham’s roles was to facilitate interaction between the physical sciences and biology. At 37, I was comfortably ensconced at Berkeley as a tenured full professor, and having no research interest in biology, I went along with a certain measure of skepticism.
The postdoc, Jay Groves, brought with him a paper about the immunological synapse, which is the structured zone of spatially patterned receptors and ligands that forms between a lymphocyte and an antigen-presenting cell (APC) bearing molecular signatures of pathogens. While immunologists previously had x-ray crystallography images showing how some of these proteins interacted individually, this paper visualized how multiple receptors interacted at the ...
