Niels K. Jerne

December 23^rd

• Niels Kaj Jerne was a Danish immunologist who shared (with César Milstein and Georges Köhler) the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
• Jerne has provided three important theories of immunology. (1) Natural selection theory of anti-body formation (1955) which initiated modern cellular immunology since the1960s.
• (2) Somatic generation theory of the generation of antibody diversity (1968) which brought together molecular and cellular immunology in the 1970s.