David W. Talmage, 1919–2014

David W. Talmage, born the sixth of seven children, was the child of Presbytarian missionaries in Kwangju, Korea and educated through high school in that country. He began his undergraduate studies at Maryville College and moved to Davidson College in North Carolina, from which he graduated in 1941. Talmage was awarded a scholarship to attend Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, hitchhiked from Davidson to St. Louis, and earned his doctorate in medicine in 1944. Apparently, when the United States entered World War II, Talmage’s entire class was inducted into the army, so eventually he found himself at the service of the army, back in Korea dealing with a cholera epidemic, and eventually becoming Advisor to the Korean Head of Public Health for the province of Chonju.

David W. Talmage.

In 1948 Talmage, now a married man, returned to St. Louis and found himself a neighbor of, and soon a fellow in the laboratory of, Frank Dixon. There Talmage learned how to radiolabel proteins with iodine and study their clearance by antibodies. After a short stint at the University of Pittsburgh, Talmage became Head of the Allergy Division at the University of Chicago in 1952. There, together with Dr. Taliaferro, he did experiments that showed that serum antibodies are made by spleen cells and that antibodies themselves are very variable, for example in their ability to bind antigen. These experiments, in combination with the Watson and Crick discovery of the structure of DNA and the observation by Billingham, Brent, and Medawar of acquired immunological tolerance, led Talmage to describe what he called “cell selection” in an Annual Review of Medicine paper published in 1957 (1). Talmage’s “cell selection” theory proposed that the unit of selection by antigen is not the antibody itself, but rather the cell that makes the antibody, an idea that had also occurred to F. MacFarlane Burnet, who published in the same year a more extensive description of the theory, which he called “the clonal selection theory” (2). Thus, the notion that underlies our understanding of the acquired immune response actually evolved from the ideas of three people: Nils Jerne (who suggested in 1955 that “natural” antibodies existed in the animal before antigen was introduced), Talmage, and Burnet.

In 1959, Talmage moved to the University of Colorado in Denver, where he trained a number of individuals who have contributed to our understanding of the immune response, including Henry Claman, John Cohen, and many others. In collaboration with Kevin Lafferty, Talmage showed that donor leukocytes—now we would think that these are donor dendritic cells—participated in allograft rejections. His work touched on the immunosuppressive activities of macrophage-produced arginase and the notion of antigenic competition. Eventually, however, Talmage returned to his first love, theoretical physics (he called it a less socially responsible field than medicine) and published several papers elaborating hypotheses to reconcile the contradictions between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Talmage took on a number of administrative tasks for the University of Colorado and for immunologists in the United States, becoming Chair of the Department of Microbiology from 1963 to 1966, Dean of the School of Medicine from 1969 to 1971, Director of the Webb Waring Institute from 1973 to 1983, President of the American Academy of Allergy in 1965, and President of the American Association of Immunologists in 1978. Talmage was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976. Among his other honors were the Sandoz Immunology prize in 1995, the Sewall Award from the University of Colorado in 1996, the Bonfils Stanton Award in 2003, and a Distinguished Professorship at the University of Colorado.

Through all of this, Talmage was a devoted husband to his wife, LaVeryn, and a loving father and grandfather to his 5 children and 10 grandchildren. He was a humble person, despite his many accomplishments, and a staunch Darwinian who integrated his interests in the theories underlying the immune system and theoretical physics with his religious beliefs as a lifelong Presbyterian. Talmage was a peacemaker who preferred compromise to confrontation. To those of us who were his colleagues, he was an honorable, wise friend and advisor. It will be hard to find another man of such intellectual brilliance and integrity.