Statement from Professor Jack Strominger
Higgins Professor of Biochemistry, Harvard University
November 27, 2001

Don is a wonderful colleague. We and our labs worked together for 15 years on the structure of major histocompatibility proteins. It was a great collaboration, hopefully for both of us. My lab has isolated these proteins, and Don and his group had the incredible expertise to work out their structures. These molecules turned out to be the key elements required to initiate immune responses, and their structures essentially taught us how the immune system works. We shared both the Lasker Award and the Japan Prize for this work.

During this 15-year period, Don was always open, ready and eager to discuss these molecules and how they function and any other aspect of science. He is a beacon of scientific integrity and is very precise in his approach to scientific issues. When the work started in the early 1980's, technically the field was at a very primitive stage, and he also contributed to technical developments that made our joint work possible. He is clearly preeminent in his field and is one of the most distinguished scientists in the country. He is beloved and respected by everyone in the Department for his personal qualities as well as his science.

His scientific work is mainly in two fields: the structure and function of histocompatibility proteins to which I have already referred, and the functions of proteins on the surface of viruses. In the latter work he collaborates with John Skehel, the Director of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill in London and with another member of our Department, Professor Steve Harrison. These two collaborations have gone on for much longer than his collaboration with me - from the early 1970's. The structure of the influenza virus hemagglutinin worked out in the laboratories of Skehel and Wiley is one of the landmarks of molecular structures of viruses. It taught us both about the ability of influenza virus to induce formation of protective antibodies and why protection varies with different strains from year to year, and about the mechanism by which this virus penetrates cells to infect them. In more recent years the work has been extended to HIV and Ebola virus. However it is important to emphasize that virtually all of this work was carried out using proteins obtained by cloning and expression of viral DNA. Don never worked with live viruses and I doubt he even knows how to produce them (except those he produced in his own throat, lungs, and nose during infections to which we are all susceptible). More explicitly, our Department doesn't have facilities in which dangerous viruses could be produced. For a virus like Ebola, the causative agent of hemorrhagic fever in Africa, only two facilities, called level 4 facilities, in the United States could work with these dangerous viruses in any way. I cannot think of any possible link between Don's work or expertise and bioterrorism.

Jack L. Strominger
Higgins Professor of Biochemistry
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Harvard University