A lifetime's love affair with antibody formation

Professor Hans Gerhard Schwick has devoted the whole of his working life to Behringwerke, the world-renowned firm that owes its origins to Emil von Behring, the discoverer of antibodies. Schwick, like myself, has witnessed the incredible flowering of immunology during his career. He, like myself, has continued to see antibodies and immunity at the very centre of the extraordinary revolution in biology that will be seen by historians as perhaps the signal accomplishment of the last quarter of the 20th century. To give honour to such a man is easy; to know best how to do it is difficult. Therefore, I have chosen to attempt a personal odyssey--to describe my lifetime's love affair with the problem of antibody formation. This paper is in no sense any kind of history of the solution of the antibody puzzle. Rather, it is a description of one person's meandering pathway through the maze, a person who, like Professor Schwick, has been an eyewitness to history. Its intention is not self-indulgence, but a tribute to a man who has been an adornment to the scientific profession.