César Milstein (1927–2002)

(whom he had met at student political meetings in Buenos Aires) was not similarly treated and had to tag along in a third class cabin. Despite this inauspicious start, the Milsteins maintained a devoted partnership that lasted till César's death with the two occasionally collaborating on aspects of immunoglobulin biochemistry. Milstein's PhD with Dixon (his second doctorate) was on the activation of the enzyme phosphoglucomutase by heavy metals. The Cambridge biochemistry department was an exciting place to be. So much so indeed that champagne-induced inattention on the afternoon following the announcement of Fred Sanger's Nobel Prize caused Milstein to lose his first, precious crystals of phosphoglucomutase into the ice-bath. Milstein himself put much effort into improvements in the technology as well as exploring the range of its utility. These projects involved interactions with many other collaborators, usually becoming friends, and friends often becoming collaborators However, Sanger influenced Milstein's career in many other — much more beneficial — ways. They collaborated on defining the amino acid sequence around the active site of the enzyme and Sanger made clear to Milstein that he would be welcome to return to Cambridge if things did not work out following Milstein's impending returning to Argentina. This was an offer which Milstein took up some two years later. The political turbulence and interference by the military government made it impossible for Milstein to continue his work in his old institute in Buenos Aires. In 1963 he returned to Cambridge to work in the division of protein chemistry which Sanger then headed in the newly formed Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Although Milstein was never to work again in Argentina, he maintained close contact with Argentinian science and scientists throughout his life. On his return to Cambridge, Milstein shifted the focus of his research from enzymes to antibodies. This is a shift that he attributed to the influence of Sanger, who had previously had a graduate student (Rodney Porter) working in the same area. During the 1960s, Milstein worked extensively on the structure of antibody molecules — investigating the arrangement of their disulphide bridges and the nature of their sequence diversity. The genetic basis of antibody diversity was a topic that also interested Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick in the Molecular Genetics division at the MRC Lab. Indeed, Brenner and Milstein co-authored an influential but experiment-free letter to Nature proposing that antibody diversity could be …