Scientists and Their Pursuit of Excellence: Crossroads and Gateways (or Who is Who in the Festschrift) (original) (raw)

2005, Scandinavian Journal of Immunology

This editorial contains brief sketches of the contributors to this Festschrift, their photographs and their role in the scholarly career of Ivan Lefkovits. Some time ago, I gave Ivan the book Six Degrees [1] as a present in which the interconnection of people at various social levels has been described. The essence of the book is that social structures exhibit clustering-the tendency of two persons who share a mutual friend to be friends themselves. The title of the book implies that people of this planet are so closely connected that any person is only six connection steps away from any other person. Ivan and I discussed the implication of this claim in science, and the list of people below is, in a certain sense, an example of the 'Six Degrees' concept. Ivan who is an avid reader of 'everything' and especially of the 'sensical' and 'non-sensical' nature of my reading lists reacted to the Six Degrees by pointing that the Hungarian mathematician Erdös [2] defined the so-called 'Erdös number' [2] (if you have published an article with Erdös, you get to have an Erdös number one. If you haven't published an article with Erdös but you have written one with someone who has, then you have an Erdös number of two. And so on.). Because Ivan would feel uneasy to introduce the notion of an 'Ivan number', but both he and I would feel certainly comfortable with introducing the 'Jerne number', then Ivan and two contributors to this Festschrift have a 'Jerne number' one, and almost everybody else on the list 'Jerne number' two. The scientific progress of Ivan Lefkovits has some parallels with the progress of immunology. A career, such as Ivan's, arguably began sometime in the middle of his third decennium and concluded with his 'retirement' in the middle of his seventh decennium. In the progress of cellular immunology, this roughly coincides, in the beginning, with the realization of the role of T and B lymphocytes in inducible immunity (1966) and the invention of the assay for individual antibody-forming cells. The retirement of Ivan coincides with the 'omics' revolution with its tidal wave of information. It is striking that this period of time roughly correlates with the founding and eventual termination of the Basel Institute of Immunology (BII). Ivan has been identified with that same institution during its entire existence, from being a founding member with Niels Jerne to being the last to retire from the institution, bring in the flag and turn out the lights. The topics of interest and endeavour of Ivan begin with clonal analysis and the interaction of cells of the immune system, progressed to a molecular analysis of the components of the immune system and, with use of molecular genetics, to accomplish unique measurements of the expression of the molecules associated with immunity. In short, Ivan and his laboratory have been pioneering in the application of biology to the understanding of the immune system. He might have been more famous if only he had chosen the word 'proteomics' instead of 'proteinpaedia'. The sequential order of contributions in this volume is quasichronological. It is not in the order that Ivan Lefkovits met his colleagues and friends, but rather as they interacted scientifically, collaborated and mutually influenced each other. The contributors-each in a different way-played a crucial role in Ivan's life. Claudia Henry is the only scientist from the pre-BII era who has contributed. Claudia, a close colleague of Niels Jerne, was the first scientist to teach Ivan immunology. Three contributions to this volume mark Ivan's sabbatical periods in Oxford, Paris and Rotterdam and two articles reflect the long-term, quasisabbatical participation in the life of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague-in the period after the 'velvet' revolution, 1989. The list of friends and colleagues in Basel is long, and some of the most influential ones are not alive anymore-Niels Jerne,