Jan Klein was born in Silesia, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) in 1936. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Charles University in Prague in 1955 and 1958, respectively. After teaching science in Prague schools for three years, he applied to the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1961 and embarked upon a career in research in immunological tolerance under Milan Hasek. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1965 but due to political factors in his home country, he immigrated to the United States in 1968 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1997.
Jan Klein is best known for his work on the major histocompatibility complex (Mhc), a system of genes responsible for the rejection of unmatched organ transplants. He co-discovered a new class of Mhc genes that are essential for the regulation of the immune response, including the production of antibodies. Later, his studies on the evolution of the Mhc genes led him to turn his scientific interests to evolutionary biology. He formulated and provided evidence for the notion that much of the genetic variation present in a species is passed on to new species at the time when the new species arise. His current interests include the molecular origins of the human species as well as the nature of the speciation process in East African cichlid fishes and in Darwin's finches of the Galápagos Islands.
Jan Klein is the author of two widely used monographs on the Mhc and of highly acclaimed textbooks of immunology. Most recently, he coauthored with Naoyuki Takahata a popular book on the molecular evolution of humans. He is a professor at Eberhard Karls University and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biology, both in Tübingen, Germany.
We suggest the following stories as good places to start within the collection:
- Birth in Czechoslovakia
- Critical events in life
- Reading the Communist dossier on myself
- Writing my first book on immunogenetics