The Heidelberger-Kabat Lecture’s foundations date to the mid-1950s when the university instituted a lecture series to honor Dr. Michael Heidelberger, Columbia’s first professor of immunochemistry and the founding father of the field.  Subsequently, the university established a symposium named for Dr. Elvin Kabat, a Columbia professor who studied under Dr. Heidelberger and whose research led to the identification of the proteins responsible for antibody activity.  The two lectures, merged in 2001, are a premier forum for new developments and discoveries in immunochemistry.

Michael Heidelberger (1888 - 1991)

Trained in organic chemistry, Michael Heidelberger embarked on the characterization of the immunologic specificity of pneumococcal polysaccharides in the 1920s and continued this work after his move to Columbia in 1928. His work demonstrated that polysaccharides are effective antigens (in the absence of any peptide component), thus dispelling the myth that only proteins could serve as antigens; and that antibodies are proteins, bringing immunochemistry out of the vague realm of colloidal chemistry. Using antibodies as specific reagents, Heidelberger carried out structural analyses of a wide variety of naturally occurring polysaccharides. Heidelberger brought the precise methods of analytical chemistry to the determination of antibodies, antigens, and complement on a weight basis, providing the gold standard against which miniaturized and rapid methods such as RIA and ELISA could be standardized and compared.

Elvin A. Kabat (1914 - 2000)

During his doctoral work, Elvin Kabat developed a life-long interest in carbohydrate chemistry, which later led to his unraveling the complex chemistry of human blood group substances. In 1937-38, Kabat used electrophoresis to show that immunoglobulins comprise the "gamma globulin" fraction of human serum and demonstrated that gamma globulin was present in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with multiple sclerosis. In 1947, Kabat began to work on an animal model of MS in monkeys, establishing the autoimmune character of this disease. He initiated the quantitative study of antibodies in anaphylaxis and allergy and provided the first estimates of the size and shape of an antibody's antigen combining site. Kabat received the National Medal of Science in 1991.

2011-2012 EVENTS

"Mammalian Stress Sensors in Health and Disease" Mark M. Davis, Ph.D. The Burt and Marion Avery Family Professor of Immunology Stanford University School of Medicine Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Wednesday, April 11 12 noon Hammer Health Sciences Center, Room 401 701 West 168th Street

Mark M. Davis, Ph.D., is the Director of the Stanford Institute for Immunology, Transplantation and Infection (ITI), a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Behring-Heidelberger Prize from the American Association of Immunologists, the Gairdner Award, the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine, and the Pius XI Award from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Davis received his PhD in molecular biology from the California Institute of Technology. He spent three years as a postdoctoral and staff fellow at the National Institutes of Health before joining the faculty at Stanford in 1983.

Dr. Davis is well-known for identifying most of the T-cell receptor genes, which are responsible for the ability of T lymphocytes to "see" foreign entities. He and his research group have made many subsequent discoveries about the structure and mode of action of this type of molecule . He also developed a novel way of labeling specific T lymphocytes according to the molecules that they recognize, and this procedure is now the method of choice in many clinical and basic science studies of T cell activity, from new vaccines against cancer to identification of "rogue" T cells in autoimmunity. His current research interests involve understanding the molecular interactions that underlie T cell recognition and the challenges of human immunology, specifically how to develop reliable "metrics" of immunological health and a "systems level" understanding of an immune response to vaccination or infection. 

PAST HEIDELBERGER-KABAT LECTURERS

2011- Dr. Laurie Glimcher, Irene Heinz Given
Professor of Immunology,
Harvard School of Public Health
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

2010- Dr. Richard A. Flavell, Sterling Professor and Chairman
Yale University School of Medicine