E-Board No. 57

In Memorium; Jack Marchalonis

In Memoriam: Jack Marchalonis
This e-board is devoted the the memory of Jack Marchalonis with tributes that were contributed by some of those whom he touched with his life.

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I was fortunate early in my career as a comparative immunologist to be able to attend the 2nd International Congress of Immunology, in Brighton, England. This was in July 1974. With a background in zoology and interest in internal defense mechanisms, I was accustomed to meeting more medically oriented folk who would look askance at any one (like me) who seemed to think that ‘immunology’ might be relevant to study in species other than ‘man’. However, I had seen the name J.J. Marchalonis on one or two papers dealing with animals with ‘respectable’ immune systems and, in Brighton, I happened to stop in on a talk by this person. I was swept off my feet! This man, already well respected in the field, looked younger than my 33 years, was talking authoritatively about immunology in hagfish, and was clearly completely clued in (indeed sophisticated!) regarding phylogeny and the evolutionary relationships among species that were not primates or rodents! The impact of this on me was profound: it would, after all, be respectable to develop a career as a comparative immunologist! And that is where my heart lay, so it was a happy day. Though much else will be written and spoken about Jack, I will always be grateful that he ‘came along’ and assisted in bringing respectability to studies on the evolution of immune systems.

Chris Bayne


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In Memoriam: Jack Marchalonis

As one ages and per force becomes more isolated, the loss of friends and colleagues looms as all the more touching and meaningful. Jack and I have had a long friendship that was special in that we enjoyed our differences, and interestingly enough managed to convince each other so that with time, our positions began to coincide. I am accompanying this remembrance with a collation of our e mails exchanged over the last years. They should be part of his archives.
We met at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in the early 1970’s. My first impression was that he was a brash kid with much to learn but I soon realized that I was dealing with uninhibited enthusiasm, rather than an uncritical enjoyment of all that is maverick in science. He engaged me in evolutionary thinking that was to guide his later scientific career and become the basis of my theoretical studies.
While over the years we met occasionally at meetings and conferences, we kept in touch criticizing each others ideas and values. I was looking forward to seeing him at the Athens Autoimmunity Meeting in late May 2007 where he was to be a major speaker. When he didn’t show up I was informed by the organizers that he was ill, but I never realized how gravely.
His absence leaves a huge chasm in our terra firma. There are precious few who can even begin to fill that gap.

Mel Cohn


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A personal tribute to Jack Marchalonis: I feel very fortunate that I had an exchange of e-mail letters with Jack about a month or so before he died. I took the opportunity to tell him how grateful I continue to be that he invited me to work in his group at the "Hall" in Melbourne. I recalled to him that the arrangements for the visit were made while we were having dinner in an Hungarian restaurant during the International Immunology Congress in Brighton, UK. We had been friends before, but working in his lab gave me a greater sense of just what kind of person he was. He left me with no doubt about his energy. We walked to work each morning together, until it became apparent that his long strides were making me run to keep up with him. Moreover, during the time that we were together, the lifts in the building weren't working and he would take those stairs two at a time to the fifth floor, while I dragged myself up one step at a time. I was impressed by his intelligence, generosity, his wide range of research interests and his commitment to hard work, but what I want to add to this characterization is his courage and sensitivity. Others will talk of other things, but I thought that I would just focus on these aspects of his character, as I was a witness to both during a painful part of his career. I was with Jack at a couple of international meetings where he was verbally attacked, that is the appropriate word, for interpreting his data to suggest that the T cell receptor, like the B cell receptor, might be an immunoglobulin. It must be remembered that the T cell receptor, as we know it today had not yet been described and that Jack was just doing what we all do. We let our data inform us as best it can. After one particularly tough and lengthy exchange, Jack and I left the meeting together and I just let him talk. He was clearly very upset. I don't think that he ever understood why he was being so fiercely, and in my view, so unfairly, attacked for his not so unreasonable view for the time. Despite enduring rough meetings, he continued to speak out about what the data suggested to him. It turned out, of course, that later studies showed us all that the T cell receptor, while a relative, was structurally and functionally different from immunoglobulin. It's my view, that Jack, while highly sensitive to the unrelenting criticism, demonstrated the courage of his convictions, convinced that the truth would eventually become known. I learned a good deal from him and in later years, I tried to follow his example in my own career. Jack, I'm grateful to you for the support you provided me over the years and for the pioneering paths in comparative immunology that you gave birth to. You were a good friend and an excellent research scientist.

Larry Ruben


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John (Jack) Marchalonis

John was a long-standing member of ISDCI, a forward thinking scientist and a major contributor to the development of comparative immunology. He was a regular supporter of our international meetings, for which he was a plenary presenter and delivered outstanding talks. But he will be remembered not just for his ground-breaking science but also for his cheerful smile, his good sense of humour and his laid back easy going manner. He has inspired many young scientists and enriched our Society enormously. His passing has come cruelly early. Although his work will stand as a lasting memorial, we will miss him sorely.

Val Smith


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Jack Marchalonis was a pioneer who, over 40 years ago, recognized the power of applying modern biochemical (and later molecular genetic) approaches to the study of comparative immunology. He made major contributions to many
areas of immunology, but his true passion was always for the evolution of the immune system. Jack generated great excitement and enthusiasm for
science amongst his colleagues and students. His impact on the field, directly through his work, and indirectly through those who trained with
him, has been immense.

Greg Warr


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IN MEMORIUM
John Jacob “Jack” Marchalonis
July 22, 1940- June 22, 2007

"His loyalty he kept, his love, his Zeal."
-Milton
Paradise Lost

It is with extreme sadness that we inform the scientific community of the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Dr. John J. Marchalonis ("Jack") on June 22, 2007 in Tucson, Arizona, at the young age of 66. His life and work had a profound influence not only in science, but also on the lives of the many people with whom he interacted. Fortunately, his pioneering work survives him. Always at the cutting edge, Jack was making new discoveries throughout his career, until two weeks before his death. He was a renowned, highly regarded world-class scientist, and one of the leaders in immunology. Even so, Jack was ahead of his time, and as such, the significance, implications, and impact of some of his work has yet to be fully comprehended and appreciated.
Jack’s main achievements were the founding of the modern field of comparative and evolutionary Immunology and the identification and characterization of the T cell receptor. He was convinced that many of the complexities of the immune response could best be understood by studying immunity in its phylogenetic setting. Another main achievement was his insight that B and T cells must share the fundamental properties of lymphocyte recognition. He was a pioneer in the fusion of cellular immunology and molecular immunology. He was trained as an immunochemist, and, during his graduate work with the Nobel Prize winner Gerry Edelman, he began to study the structure of immunoglobulins from very simple species such as the dogfish, and lamprey, ultimately selecting the shark as his animal of choice. As a postdoctoral fellow, he moved to work with Sir Gus Nossal and Sir Macfarland Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in
Australia where the T cell itself had just been discovered. It was natural for him to become passionately interested in the identification of the T cell receptor, thus moving effortlessly into the field of membrane biology.
Jack discovered and characterized immunoglobulin-like antigen receptors of T-lymphocytes (“T cell receptors”) long before anyone dreamed of antigen-specific T cell receptors. Prior to his discovery, it was widely assumed that the receptor would be uniquely different from other immunologic proteins, notably antibodies. Jack found that they were very similar. He was subjected to intense criticism for this discovery, that, at times, erupted into legendary debates at meetings. With the advent of immunogenetics, Jack was proved correct. In the process of this work, he developed a method to gently label single immunoglobulin molecules by lactoperoxidase-catalyzed radioiodination. This procedure is cited by Current Contents as one of their citation classics (Biochem. J. 1969, 113, 299-305). Jack's and his collaborators' use of his lactoperoxidase-catalyzed radioiodination technique led to descriptions of B cell membrane immunoglobulins, the shedding of lymphocyte surface proteins (at a time that cell membranes were viewed as static), and the T cell receptor for antigen.
His positions included Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Professor and Chairman of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Medical University of South Carolina, and Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology University of Arizona, as well as Professor of Medicine and Pathology. During this time, he became one of the first scientists to describe natural autoantibodies and their potential roles in immunomodulation, and went on to identify T
cell receptor derived peptides which served as unique immunomodulatory roles in autoimmune diseases. . He proposed the rapid evolutionary appearance of the combinatorial recognition repertoire that became known as the "big bang" theory. This work contributed to forming a unified model of antigen recognition. He proposed the mechanism of combinatorial diversification in sharks, the most primitive jawed vertebrates, and suggested mechanisms involving horizontal transfer of regulatory elements from microbes to ancestral vertebrates to account for its origins. More recently, he developed synthetic T cell receptor peptides that had the potential to cure cardiac disease. These peptides restored the capacity of the older animals to respond to viral infections including coxsackie virus, decreased cardiac viral burden, prevented death from heart failure, and actually strengthened the heart muscle by enhancing repair.
Jack was recognized as one of the finest scientific writers of his generation, and was also an inspiring and effective speaker and organizer. His interests were not restricted to his areas of research. He was widely read and could converse knowledgeably on almost any subject including math, physics, history, and astronomy. He wrote poetry. He even ran for political office early in his career! He was a successful athlete in his college days, competing in track and field [Top figure above shows Jack making the long jump that held the distance record at Lafayette University for decades] and basketball among others, and often bragged that he personally swam with the sharks to draw blood from them. While a graduate student at Rockefeller Institute, he and his friends played football as the "Tiger Toad" team. This team included Caleb “Tuck” Finch and Eric Davidson. The three of them remained friends throughout his life.
Jack was not only brilliant, but also creative, deeply loyal, a leader with unimpeachable integrity, but also a very gentle human being. He was a person with deep personal convictions who fought for what he believed was right, sometimes at great personal expense. He was highly regarded nationally and internationally and received numerous honors for his seminal discoveries. In spite of this, throughout his life he was subjected to professional criticism that, at times, erupted into legendary debates at meetings. Time and data proved Jack correct. Jack never slowed down, he continued to work, inspire, and publish: ­ at the time of his death he had over 270 articles in top journals, many invited chapters in books, as well as 8 original books. His publications place him in the top 1 percent of cited authors in biology and biochemistry, and Jack is listed by "Current Contents" among the 1000 most-cited contemporary scientists from 1965-1978. At the time of his death, he was working a new edition of his classic book Immunity in Evolution.
Jack Marchalonis was a very decent, honorable and dignified man who was a reflective and profound global thinker with an engaging personality and a witty sense of humor. He was a modest person who abhorred pomposity, arrogance, and greed. He would not tolerate dishonesty in any form by anyone regardless of his or her position. This led, in one instance, to what Jack referred to as his “Cromwellian period,” in which he repeatedly tried to improve faculty governance and protect faculty rights, and to improve his university as a whole. He always strived to do what was best for people and what was right. This led to co-authorship of law review articles supporting academic freedom and due process for all faculty in our country.
Jack was extremely helpful to his students, very strongly supportive of his faculty, extremely loyal to his friends, and was an outstanding father. He was a dear friend who enriched the lives of all those who knew him, and was really a gentleman in the true sense of the word. We will deeply miss his friendship, his insightfulness and his wise counsel.
Science has lost a creative genius and giant. The world has lost a great man. He will be missed. . . . . .

He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
--from Rupert Brooke “1914 IV. The Dead” Selected Poems Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd, London 1922

M. Zouhair Atassi
Vera Byers
Robert Cone
Marguerite Kay
Ronald Kennedy
Samuel Schluter
Roy Spece


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One thing I will always remember about Jack was how he was always supportive of the graduate students in the Biochemistry Department at MUSC. He always took the time to talk to us about our research and discuss ideas. Also how many people can say they had tea with Sir Macfarlane Burnet in their chairman's office while in graduate school?

Mel Wilson


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Jack Marchalonis was a highly respected colleague, critic and friend. I knew Jack for quite a number of years and the first time I met him was at a Congress in Ixtapa in Mexico. He captured my interest because he started his talk with a picture of a shark and said that he worked with sharks and that he worked with humans but often couldn’t tell the difference. This was typical of Jack’s very good sense of humour, but always with a sense of seriousness. Many times I had the pleasure of discussing matters of mutual interest with him. I had a very high regard for him from both personal and scientific grounds and I will mourn the loss of an excellent immunologist and a delightful person. Vila i frid Jack.

Kenneth Soderhall


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MY TRIBUTE TO J J MARCHALONIS

A Pillar

Pillars as defined by most dictionaries: a vertical structure used as a support or ornament; a chief supporter of something-a pillar of the community. Jack by every definition, you were a pillar and by all accounts like Greek and Roman pillars, that still stand, you will also. You were vertical in stature but not in intellect; you were a supporter of comparative immunology; you were a stalwart of our community. You are a pillar Jack!
Jack, I would just like to chat a bit, fortunate for both of us because of so much interweaving, of crisscrossing and of zigzagging—resulting in an intricate pattern of concurrence, which we never seemed to have planned but that was always the most reassuring outcome. I was not realistic last year when I sent a note to you with Sam Schulter from our 10th ISDCI Congress that Greg Warr so superbly organized. Your presence was sorely missed. At the moment and probably for a long time to come I am having to disguise my discomfort---the reality has not yet deepened.
Jack the biologist—from the old school, emerged avant-garde as a leader in developing the now established molecular biology but about the immune system! You were as well at home and comfortable and in touch with sea squirts (tunicates), our immediate vertebrate ancestors as you were with fish and toads and tuataras, mice and men! Jack you were not an intellectual snob—shrouded in the fog of molecular tedium---one approach to the organism, but you were the consummate biologist. You could hob nob with us in tide pools at the ocean or loosen rocks in the desert or don an starched white coat in the most clinical arenas dedicated to the immediate and practical—the ills of humans. You had an enviable pedigree—small college under the tutelage of those who liked to teach.
But Jack you were migratory—a seasonal (?) fellow, climbing, seeking the best climate where you could lead and pioneer in your own somewhat stubborn but enormously imaginative and productive fashion. In all the years of our friendship and existence during the development of comparative immunology, I never felt thwarted in my, visions, goals, directions, and missions; you were forever cooperative. On the less intellectual side, we did not meld with respect to physical endurance. I seem to remember that you, contrary to my interests. were the athletic sports fellow—basketball? Not a problem---for aspects of humanity other than the basics, it is no crime to not concur on certain points.
We, you, I and others are the latter day descendants of the ever so fecund and bountiful spawning of Elie Metchnikoff. In the 19th century Metchnikoff started this: Eureka! PHAGOCYTOSIS—time flew by during the 20th century and here we are perhaps a couple of lineages removed from him our seminal father—but maybe not so far? Why are we ever so close? As models, invertebrates have provided and still promise almost unimaginable sources of ideas and practical solutions that are purely intellectual and that are also promising---they are not barren—but as prolific as they often reproduce, doubly insuring their own survival and ours as well: cures and ideas.
I also hope that you read one of my more recent reviews (Digging for Innate Immunity since Darwin and Metchnikoff—a cover story for BioEssays (24:319-333), an update on earthworm immune mechanisms both cellular and molecular. I only mention this since my memory jogs that you were ever supportive of my ideas, visions, plans (for the Division of Comparative Immunology [which I set up and you became Chair] (for the then American Society of Zoologists; now Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology); my dreams of ISDCI (10th Anniversary Congress) and our journal DCI (1977; volume 31). Cooper, E.L. (Ed.) 1974. Invertebrate Immunology. Contemporary Topics in Immunobiology Vol. 4. Plenum Press, New York, 299 pp; Marchalonis, J. J. 1977 Immunity in Evolution Harvard University Press. 316 pages; again there is crisscrossing!
I wrote before in BioEssays: “Darwin lead us into the field and Metchnikoff into the lab”. Jack you and I tramped around Woods Hole, lots of beer at the Captain Kid was de rigueur for us—Woods Hole, a refuge and for both of us an extension. There we organized with Gregory Beck and Gail Habicht another inspiring and soul-searching gathering: Beck, G., Habicht, G.S., Cooper, E.L. and Marchalonis, J.J. (eds.). 1994. Primordial Immunity, Foundations for the Vertebrate Immune System. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 376 pp. And we merited a review in Science!
According to John Travis “What has reawakened the field of comparative immunology, as presentations at the meeting made clear, is the advent of molecular biology, which opens the way to sophisticated analyses of immune systems” (Travis, J. 1993 Tracing the Immune systems’ Evolutionary History. Science 261:164-165). And Jack your response: “We can finally make direct and meaningful comparisons. Then John commented again: “The panoply of immune strategies found in simpler organisms adds to the intellectual appeal of comparative immunology—but may also impede its progress. Now my response: “Compared to mammalian immunology, we have advanced a bit slower because we have fewer people and almost everyone of us is working on different models. And those involved in moving the subject forward face a constant battle to attract new students and funding at a time when ‘relevant’ research is prized”.
Surely our arrival at comparative immunology was by means of shared views or most probably by different routes—yet crisscrossing and at one point; even on many occasions and due to numerous opportunities—there was an emerging convergence, never divergence! Jack you did it surely through The Rockefeller Institute’s molecular influences and I via the Woods Hole, Salisbury Cove and Brown University ethos. Nevertheless, the resulting coincidences are amazing, but in some respects fortuitous—we never discussed these agreeable convergences. Take a look for example at these amazing coincidences. The use of the term comparative immunology in single authored and edited texts! Marchalonis, J.J., ed. 1976. Comparative Immunology. Blackwell Press, Oxford, 470 pp. Cooper, E. L. 1976 Comparative Immunology, 300 pp; 16 Chapters Part of 10 volume Prentice Hall Series in Immunology. (Translated into Russian 1980).
So very sorry Jack I will miss you from all the activities whose interests we shared. I will miss that hail and hearty greeting, that strong handshake full of character warm and friendly and robust maybe a back slap, never overbearing. But I will remember your wise admonition before retiring to my guest room in your desert house when you invited me to Tucson to lecture: “Please check your shoes in the morning for fear of a scorpion”. The both of us were never frightened by invertebrate animals and what they could offer to comparative immunology, we nevertheless recognized that certain creatures are pests, and some are beneficial, beautiful to view and then there are others that are to be feared, respected, but never destroyed.

Edwin Cooper


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My understanding of evolution of immunity was strongly influenced by the lectures and papers of Dr. J. J. Marchalonis, who had an infectious enthusiasm for the evolutionary aspects of immunity. His lectures at international scientific meetings were always very well received because of the strength of science and the brightness of presentation. Jack Marchalonis’ approach to science and his expertise in the field of evolutionary immunobiology stimulated a lot of ideas. My favourite one was the concept of the "Big-Bang" in the evolution of immunity, introduced in 1990 and gradually extended later towards the concept of the combinatorial immune system of jawed vertebrates. I cannot resist discussing it not only in my papers, but preferably in my lectures and seminars concerning the evolution of immunity.
The great contributions of Dr. J. J. Marchalonis to the contemporary knowledge of the molecular basis of immunity and his intellectual contribution to the presently accepted picture of the evolution of immunity, made him one of the most prominent scientist in the field of immunology.

Barbara Plytycz


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Scholarship donations may be made to Lafayette College, 307 Markel Hall, Easton, PA. 18042, in honor of John Marchalonis. Donations should be marked: "Attention: Marchalonis Memorial Fund."
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