Ivan Lefkovits


Ivan Lefkovits is a Czechoslovak-born Swiss immunologist and a founding member of the Basel Institute for Immunology.

Life

In 1944, Lefkovits was deported with his older brother Paul and his mother to Ravensbrück. Paul was killed there during the “Mitwerda” action, while Ivan and his mother were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. They were liberated in 1945 by the British Army. The rest of the Lefkovits family perished in the Holocaust.
From 1956 to 1961 he studied chemistry at the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague. After study at the Institute of Microbiology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and a two-year research stay at the Laboratorio Internazionale di Genetica e Biofisica (LIGB) in Naples, he received his PhD in molecular biology in 1967. That year he emigrated to Germany, where at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut under Niels Kaj Jerne he headed the basic research group in immunology.
In 1969 he was tasked with establishing the Basel Institute for Immunology and became one of its founding members. He worked at the institute until its closure in 2001, playing a central role in its scientific development, organization, and international character. Thereafter, until 2012, he led the proteomics working group in the Department of Biomedicine at the University Hospital of Basel.
Lefkovits was assistant professor and professor at Philipps University of Marburg and a visiting professor at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, at Necker–Enfants Malades Hospital, at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and at the Trudeau Institute, Saranac Lake, New York.
From 1991 to 1994 he taught immunology courses at Charles University and at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, as well as at the Central European Summer School of Immunology in Pieštany, České Budějovice, Košice and Prague.

Work

At the LIGB, Lefkovits studied ribosomal proteins and “chloramphenicol particles,” as well as the conditions for reconstituting functional ribosomes. He subsequently established a microculture system based on the in vitro Mishell–Dutton culture in immunology.
At the Basel Institute for Immunology he first adapted the microculture system to the new method of limiting dilution analysis (LDA). He then investigated the function of B lymphocytes, their clonal proliferation, and the frequency of precursor cells during the induction of antibody formation.
He went on to develop proteomics methods to analyze intracellular mechanisms of immune competence. In his last ten years at the Basel Institute for Immunology, Lefkovits investigated the development of lymphocyte cDNA libraries, ordered libraries, and their cell-free protein-synthesis profiles. In collaboration with cardiac surgery at University Hospital Basel, he conducted proteomic studies of cardiac muscle proteins.
As a Holocaust survivor, Lefkovits has contributed to educational and historical initiatives related to the Second World War. From 1995 to 2011 he served on the board of the “Kontaktstelle für Überlebende des Holocaust in der Schweiz”. He initiated a memoir collection funded by the Swiss Confederation, Mit meiner Vergangenheit lebe ich, in which 15 Holocaust survivors recount their lives during and after National Socialism. The title pages of the collection and its individual chapters were designed by Gerhard Richter. These are excerpts from the four paintings of his monumental cycle Birkenau, exhibited in the Reichstag building in Berlin. Lefkovits is a member of the accompanying commission group of the intergovernmental Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, to which Switzerland has belonged since 2004. He does educational outreach through eyewitness talks at CVJM youth summer camps on the grounds of the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and at the Anne Frank House in Oldau, as well as in various schools, gymnasiums, universities, institutes, associations and communities in Switzerland, Germany and the Czech Republic.

Selected publications

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Memberships

Awards