Born in
Kensington, Michael Samuel Neuberger was the fourth of five children of Albert Neuberger and Lilian Ida (née Dreyfus). He was educated at
Westminster School and
Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Natural Sciences in 1974. Neuberger then joined Brian Hartley at Imperial College to study for his PhD. During this time, and at Hartley's suggestion, he visited the South African biologist
Sydney Brenner at the
Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. Their discussions drew Neuberger back to the LMB in 1980 and he remained there for the rest of his career, eventually becoming its deputy director.
César Milstein at the LMB recommended that Neuberger spent some time studying immunology with
Klaus Rajewsky at the
University of Cologne; he spent 18 months there, after his PhD. Neuberger “was probably most widely known for delineating the role of DNA deamination in immunity through his pioneering work that explained how cytosine deamination drives the somatic hypermutation and class-switch recombination of antibody-encoding genes. Following the identification of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) by Honjo and Durandy as the protein essential for both of those processes, Michael produced a series of seminal papers during 2002 that laid bare the mechanism that had perplexed immunologists for 30 years.”
Family Michael Neuberger married Gillian Anne (Gill) Pyman, an Australian doctor, on 6 September 1991. They had four children: Saskia, Lydia, Thomas and Benjamin. He died of myeloma, a cancer of antibody-producing cells, at
Addenbrooke's Hospital,
Cambridge, on 26 October 2013. "At his request, he was buried in a Jewish consecrated grave in the grounds of the Baptist oratory, next to his family weekend home in Suffolk." ==Some key papers==