César Milstein

César Milstein (1927-2002) was an Argentine biochemist awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984, jointly with Georges Kohler and Niels Jerne, for developing the hybridoma technique for producing monoclonal antibodies, antibodies of a single defined specificity manufactured by fusing antibody producing cells with immortal myeloma cells. The technique, developed with Kohler at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1975, transformed biomedical research and diagnostics and became the basis for numerous therapeutic drugs still in wide clinical use. Milstein and Kohler chose not to patent the discovery, a decision later widely discussed for its enormous foregone commercial value given the scale of the pharmaceutical industry the technique eventually enabled. Milstein spent most of his career at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain after leaving Argentina during a period of political upheaval affecting Argentine science.