César Milstein

César Milstein was born in 1927 in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. His father had arrived from Ukraine at 14, alone and penniless, and worked as a travelling salesman; his mother was a teacher who was determined her sons would go to university. He studied chemistry in Buenos Aires, where he was more interested in student politics than lectures, and took a doctorate there before winning a scholarship to Cambridge to work with Fred Sanger.

He went home in 1961 to head a division of a national institute. It lasted a year. After the military coup of 1962 the institute's director was forced out and its scientists were subjected to political vetting. Milstein resigned and returned to Cambridge in 1963, this time for good. He often said he had not left Argentina; Argentina had left him.

At the Laboratory of Molecular Biology he worked on how the immune system produces such an enormous variety of antibodies. In 1975, with a German postdoc named Georges Köhler, he fused antibody-producing cells with cancer cells to create hybrids that would grow forever and make a single, chosen antibody in unlimited quantity. These monoclonal antibodies are now used in pregnancy tests, in cancer and arthritis drugs worth tens of billions a year, and in laboratories everywhere.

Milstein did not patent the technique. He thought it should be freely available, and the British authorities did not act. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1984 and died in Cambridge in 2002.