Fritz Bach: Transplant Pioneer Extraordinaire(1935-2011)

摘要

Fritz Heinz Bach, a world-class transplant immunologist and the Lewis Thomas Distinguished Professor of Immunology (Surgery) at Harvard Medical School died suddenly on Sunday, August 14, 2011 at his home at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, after a long illness. He was 77 years old. Bach was one of a very few young biological scientists with the genius, insight and good fortune to be involved in a discovery that had a profound, long-lasting impact on their field. He was generally regarded as one of the early giants of transplant immunology, a visionary with legendary ability to identify big concepts and ideas among masses of data and observations whose contributions changed transplant immunology as we know it. His early observations on cell transformations that occur in in vitro cultures of peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBL) from unrelated individuals (for which he coined the term mixed lymphocyte cultures [MLCs]), his studies on the relation of these changes to the alloimmune response and histocompatibility antigens, and his early application of the MLC assay to the selection of compatible tissue and organ donors unleashed a veritable perfect storm of related progress in experimental and clinical transplantation that persists to this day.