Cardiovascular Research Institute Basel

The Basel Institute for Immunology

What is it famous for? Its unique, non-hierarchical structure, which resulted from the vision of founding director Niels Jerne. He made the revolutionary decisions that the new institute should be devoted entirely to immunology, and that each researcher should be free to choose with whom and on what they work. The Basel Institute for Immunology, or BII, has no positions other than 'member' amon...

Book Review: The History of the Basel Institute for Immunology

Prof. Ivan Lefkovits writes from the unique perspective of being present for the entire 32 years that the Basel Institute for Immunology (BII) was the global focus of immunological research and discovery. The book is the story of the place and people leading to the discovery of the genetic mechanisms of immunoglobulin diversity and the elucidation of the immunological network, leading quickly t...

Institute for Environmental Research

The Scripps Research Institute

Lansbury and Caughey state in their Primer on prion proteins [1] “Mice lacking the PrP gene, first produced by Charles Weissmann and colleagues, are viable, but have altered neuronal function and develop neurological abnormalities later in life.” This statement is misleading. The PrP-knockout mice produced in our laboratory [2] do not show neurological abnormalities at any time and we have neve...

Geneva Biomedical Research Institute

In 1980 Mark Ptashne published a review entitled How λ repressor and Cro work followed by another, in 1988, called How eukaryotic transcriptional activators work. The bold — almost, some might feel, naïve — ambition these titles betray is unashamedly the author’s: to generate a coherent picture of how genes are switched on and off. Mark Ptashne’s approach has always been transparent. During gro...