Charles Janeway Jr.

Charlie Janeway, immunologist, a leading authority on the T cell and creator of our present understanding of the link between innate and acquired immunity, died of cancer on April 12 at his home in New Haven at the age of 60. Charlie obtained his undergraduate and medical degree at Harvard, following in the long family medical tradition. Like other talented young medical scientists at the time of the Korean War he then joined the National Institutes of Health, where William Paul introduced him to the new subject of T-cell biology. After periods of research at Uppsala and Cambridge he moved to Yale in 1977. He became a professor of pathology there in 1983 and later helped found the section of immunobiology. The head of an active research group and author of more than 300 papers, his work touched on nearly all aspects of T-cell function. He wrote the leading textbook of immunology, 'Immunobiology: the immune system in health and disease'. Charlie's outstanding quality was prescience. His great aim was to understand how the whole immune system fitted together. As his group at Yale grew in size it began to generate a stream of cutting edge papers, each bearing the name of one of his young colleagues as lead author. Yet his main love, one suspects, attached to the single author reviews that he published intermittently. He used them to paint a broad picture, into which the many advances being made worldwide in this rapidly unfolding field would fit. He also used these reviews to project his own view about how a particular area would develop, and his peers paid close attention because so often he turned out to have got it right. We who were engaged in immunobiology in the seventies and eighties felt we were playing with ideas as in a card game. Each card denoted a theory and an author, the hands could be dealt in any number of ways, and the game as played by experts could be extremely fast. We came increasingly to depend on Charlie's phrases for guidance in our games. He... used these reviews to project his own view about how a particular area would develop, and his peers paid close attention because so often he turned out to have got it right. One of these phrases was 'the good, the bad and the ugly', referring to T-cell development in the thymus where bad …