Herman Nathaniel Eisen was an American immunologist and cancer researcher.
15 Facts About Herman Eisen
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Herman Eisen served on the faculty at New York University School of Medicine in the early 1950s, became the Chief of Dermatology at the Washington University School of Medicine in 1955, and was a founding member of the MIT Center for Cancer Research.
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Herman Eisen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918, one of four children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
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Herman Eisen worked briefly as an assistant in pathology at Columbia University, where he was first exposed to immunology research by Michael Heidelberger.
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Herman Eisen then returned to NYU again for his residency.
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Herman Eisen was one of the first recipients of a new form of National Institutes of Health fellowship for physician-scientists, which supported further work at NYU with Fred Karush studying antibodies.
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Herman Eisen next moved to Sloan-Kettering to work with David Pressman and left after a year to return to NYU as a faculty member.
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Herman Eisen found this combination unsustainable and therefore was receptive when approached by Barry Wood to recruit him to Washington University School of Medicine as the Chief of Dermatology there.
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Herman Eisen moved to Washington University in 1955 and spent five years in the position before moving to the department of microbiology and serving as its chair.
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Herman Eisen officially retired in 1989, assuming professor emeritus status, but remained active in research and in mentoring younger scientists in the MIT community.
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Herman Eisen was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1969, and a member of the Institute of Medicine in 1974.
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Herman Eisen's research is regarded as foundational in the field of immunology.
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Herman Eisen is particularly well known for his studies of affinity maturation of antibodies beginning in the late 1950s while he was at Washington University.
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Herman Eisen's wife Natalie was a physician and practiced as a pediatrician in New York, served as assistant director of Bellevue Hospital in St Louis, and then practiced at the Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center in Boston.
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Herman Eisen remained an active research scientist for many years following his official retirement and was working on a manuscript related to antibody affinity the day he died in 2014.