Last summer, Ethan M. Shevach, MD, DFAAI, ended a stellar, 56-year career of research and mentorship at the National Institutes of Health. In addition to more than five decades of scientific discovery, Dr. Shevach served as the seventh editor-in-chief of The Journal of Immunology, from 1987 to 1992. He also happens to have a connection to Boston, the site of IMMUNOLOGY2026™.
Boston Origins
Ethan Shevach grew up in Boston and attended the Boston Latin School, the oldest public high school in the United States, founded in 1635. At the time, the school still used a classical curriculum, so although he took Latin for six years, the curriculum contained no biology. Shevach credits the launch of Sputnik in 1957 for the school finally allowing him to take chemistry and physics.
Still, Shevach entered Boston University without having taken a single biology course. He matriculated in the university’s first class of a combination degree program. Students were accepted to the medical school upon admission to the program, and after two year of undergrad studies, they began medical education. Shevach earned his MD after six years at the age of 23, then completed two years of training at the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center.
Drafted into NIH
Before his internship, however, Shevach was subject to the Doctor Draft, under which all new male physicians in the United States were required to serve two years in the military. In 1967, Shevach would likely have been sent to Vietnam had he not qualified for the Associate Training Program at NIH. The U.S. Public Health Service satisfied the draft’s requirement and opened up unparalleled opportunity.
Although his preference was for what is today the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), he ended up at the National Institute of Allergy and infectious Diseases (NIAID) instead. Shevach recalled that his mentor, Ira Green, “had the knack of knowing what would work and getting reliable results fast.”
As an associate, Shevach made a major discovery. Two years before Rolf Zinkernagel and Peter Doherty published the work that earned them the Nobel Prize, Shevach discovered with Alan Rosenthal that lymphocytes and macrophages had to share the major histocompatibility complex. This remains the study he is most proud of.
Shevach remained in the Laboratory of Immune System Biology, Cellular Immunology Section, for his entire career,
Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Immunology
In 1987, Joseph D. Feldman was ready to step down from his full-time job as Editor-in-Chief of The JI after 16 years. The AAI Council decided to change the position into one that a scientist could perform while still running a laboratory of their own. Shevach came in with a plan to broaden the scope of the journal to ensure that the entire field of immunology was represented, “even those that weren’t perhaps of gigantic general interest or importance, but they were quality science.”
Praise for Shevach
We spoke with some of the scientists Dr. Shevach mentored and collaborated with at NIH to commemorate his retirement.
Wayne Yokoyama, MD
Sam J. and Audrey Loew Levin Professor, Washington University Medical Center
I was very fortunate to perform a post-doctoral fellowship in the Shevach lab because it truly shaped how I would approach science and training in my independent career. I was amazed that Ethan remembered experiments in published papers, rather than the interpretations or conclusions, which, of course, were easier to remember. When we would go over my own results, he would recall how they might be related to such published data, thereby allowing potential insights beyond the experiments that I did. Then he gave guidance for ideas to tackle next, rather than instructions. What I mean by this is that he never gave specific experiments or tasks to be done, rather it was up to me to think up the actual experiments. After a while, this approach led me to become an independent-thinking scientist rather than simply carrying out orders in a relatively mindless way.
I have taken this approach to provide guidance to students and post-docs in my own lab in the hopes that they will also become independent-thinking scientists and immunologists. I think this has worked! And I was just following Ethan’s lead.
BIllur Akkaya, MD, DPhil
Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University
When I joined the lab, I had a lot to juggle. Starting a new life on a new continent with a toddler and an infant, while trying to build momentum in my research, was not easy. Yet Ethan was very understanding of the situation I was in. He did not judge me for the meetings I missed or the odd hours I sometimes kept. Instead, he treated me as the scholar I was. He gave me the freedom to be creative. During that time, I developed a new hypothesis about how Tregs modulate antigen presentation, and he supported my request to train postbacs so that I could expand that work. With his support, I was able to build my own niche studying Treg interactions and eventually become competitive for PI positions.
Ethan is an example of a true scholar with extraordinary scientific integrity. Despite seeming old school, he has long been a genuine ally of women in science. He believes deeply in good science regardless of immediate impact, because he is never insecure about his place in building the wall of knowledge one stone at a time. Importantly, he does not feel the need to build that wall alone. He is happy to let others place the final stones and receive the credit.
Ronald Germain, MD, PhD
NIH Distinguished Investigator, NIAID
Ethan was famous for saying “That experiment won’t work.” then being excited about the results when it does. This happened to me on more than one occasion and I took his contrarian statement as a good reason to try the experiment!
His legacy was built around him being the consummate experimentalist in cellular immunity, influencing generations of younger scientists and colleagues to study the immune system using elegant design, execution, and interpretation of studies both in vitro and with animals. Intellectually, he was a leader in understanding the role of MHC molecules in T cell recognition and the biology of Tregs. His insights in these areas influenced generations of NIH investigators while having enormous impact internationally as well.
Thomas Malek, PhD
Professor, Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami
It was an honor and privilege being a member of Ethan’s group. My experience in his lab and being a member of the Laboratory of Immunology was a formative experience that defined my career. Because my desk was right next to his office, I had the daily opportunity to learn from him through informal discussions about our work. I always appreciated how Ethan backed my scientific intuition. Like many fellows in the LI, I was trying to identify the TCR. We were looking for a conserved idiotype on guinea pig T cells. This was not working out.
Ethan supported the idea to look for monoclonal antibodies that inhibited guinea pig T cell function. We did not identify the TCR but a molecule that was a potent inhibitor of T cell function. We never really figured out what this was, but looking back on it, we probably made an antibody to Fas. Later, when guinea pig reagents proved too limiting, he didn’t hesitate to let me try the same approach in mice. That pivot led us identify IL-2Rα which ultimately defined much of life’s work on the function of IL-2.
