Rolf M. Zinkernagel

Zinkernagel met his future wife Kathrin Lüdin while they were studying medicine at the University of Basel as classmates. They got married in November 1968, two weeks after they had sat for their final board examination. She is now a practicing physician.

The couple has three children. Among them, their eldest daughter, Christine Zinkernagel, is an immunologist. Their second daughter, Annelies Zinkernagel and son, Martin Zinkernagel, are physicians.

Rolf M. Zinkernagel was born on January 6, 1944 in Riehen, a village near Basel, Switzerland. His father was a PhD in biology and worked in a big pharmaceutical company in Basel and his mother was a laboratory technician.

Rolf was born second of his parents’ three children. His elder brother, Peter, became an architect and his younger sister, Anne Marie, followed his mother’s footstep to become a lab technician.

Rolf began his education at a public school in Riehen. Later he went to Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliches Gymnasium in Basel. Since the school paid more importance to science and did not teach Latin as a compulsory subject, which was still considered essential for studying law or medicine, he took four years of voluntary Latin.

In 1962, he received his matura (high school exit certificate). Since medicine offered a wider choice in profession, he took it up and enrolled at the University of Basel.

The next few years were quite tough. He first had to obtain his matura in Latin. In parallel with his medical studies, he also had to do his military service. He somehow managed all these and in 1968, passed National Board Examination, University of Basel, Faculty of Medicine.

In October 1970, after a short stint as a student of experimental medicine at the University of Zurich, Zinkernagel joined Department of Biochemistry at the University of Lausanne as a Post Doctoral Fellow. Here he worked on immunology and immune chemistry.

Although the initial project was a failure he succeeded in obtaining some positive results on the role of Immunoglobulin-A acquired from hyper-immunized cows. This work also provoked him to look for a second postdoctoral position.

In 1973, he joined Department of Microbiology at John Curtin School of Medical Research under Australian National University (Canberra) with a Visiting Fellowship granted by Swiss Foundation. Here he found space in the laboratory of Peter Doherty and started working on immunology.

Simultaneously, he started working for his doctoral degree and earned his PhD in early 1975. His dissertation paper was titled ‘The role of the H-2 gene complex in cell-mediated immunity to viral and bacterial infections in mice’.

Concurrently, he also started collaborating with Peter Doherty on immune responses in mice against the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus. Subsequently, they discovered how immune T-cells recognize virus-infected host cells and also detected the function of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC).

Zinkernagel is best remembered for his 1973 work with Peter Doherty on how the immune system tackles infection by the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, a meningitis-causing antigen. The research focused on the cytotoxic T lymphocytes or T cells; a white blood cell, capable of destroying the invading viruses and virus-infected cells.

They found that T cells from an infected mouse would destroy virus-infected cells from another mouse only if it belongs to genetically identical strain. Contrarily, if it belongs to a different genetic strain, the T cell would simply ignore it.

They also established that in order to kill infected cells, along with foreign molecules, T cells need to recognize a self-molecule called major histocompatibility complex (MHC). It is the MHC, which tells the immune system that a particular cell belongs to one’s own body.

This discovery threw new light on the general mechanism of cell immunity. It also provided the foundation for development of vaccines and medicines for infectious diseases, inflammatory diseases and cancer.