Susumu Tonegawa

Yet, as Burnett initially had his doubts about the clonal selection theory, it is telling that he published it in the obscure Australian Journal of Science, explaining the choice in his autobiography, If, perish the thought, there was something very wrong about the clonal selection concept, the publication is an out-of-the-way Australian journal and would mean that very few people in America or England would see it." Happily, the first confirming experimental evidence for the clonal selection theory arrived in 1958, when Gustav Nossel and Joshua Lederberg showed that each lymphoid cell produces only one kind of antibody by binding specificity.

In 1976, Susumu Tonegawa, his discovery of VDJ recombination, further clarified the molecular foundations of the generation of antibody diversity.

In his autobiography, Burnett ultimately stated, "...I regard the development of the clonal selection theory of immunity as my most important scientific achievement." When a biologist considers a theory his main contribution to science, that says something.

Indeed, the clonal selection theory of immunity laid the foundations for understanding immunological memory and immunological tolerance, and it was for its discovery that Burnett shared a Nobel Prize in medicine with Peter Medawar in 1960 and eventually made the development of monoclonal antibodies possible.

Hmm.

And it's, it's, uh, actually a book, uh, about Susumu Tonegawa.

Are, are you, um...

He's a Nobel, uh, laureate, uh, s- was faculty at MIT for a long time.

Just like, just like that, right?

Mm-hmm.

If you're a biomedical scientist, um, you know, the place to be is the United States, right? And so, um, also influenced by Susumu Tonegawa's book, right?

Sure.