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Ellen Rothenberg

Ellen Rothenberg joined the Division of Biology of the California Institute of Technology in 1982; since 1994 she has been a full professor. She is one of the leading molecular immunologists, focusing on gene regulatory mechanisms for T-cell development from stem cells.

Interview themes

  • From biochemistry to molecular immunology

  • As a woman in molecular biology

  • Molecular biology and immunology

  • Perspectives

  • Impact on human immunology

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Related Interview: Eric Davidson

Interview Excerpt

UD: I’ll come back to your work of today later. Now I would like to ask a few questions about the recent history of immunology, in particular, how did molecular biology influence immunology, and how did immunology influence molecular biology? All those exceptions in immunology rendered molecular biology much more complicated, didn’t they?

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ER: Oh no, no, no, it was wonderful. It was very, very early. Susumu Tonegawa found out about the rearrangement of the immunoglobulin genes in 1975, ’76, and this was before cloning. And he could do this even with the incredibly primitive methods at the time. He did get the Nobel Prize for it, so he’s easy to find. But the interesting thing about this was – there were a couple of things. As eukaryotic molecular biology developed, it was breathtaking how fast things happened. So splicing just came in 1974. And as late as when I was a graduate student, one of the things that we were taught, in 1972, ’73 was the colinearity of the gene with the protein and the transcript. But splicing already in 1974 broke this. This came from virology; it came from adenoviruses. This was one of the major things that was unthinkable in mammalian cells, but viruses are allowed to be weird. So it was accepted in the viruses, and then after cloning came in and you could get the equivalent molecules from the genome, you could see that this was a general phenomenon. So that was one violation, that was ‘74.

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