Geoffrey W. Hoffmann
Australian-Canadian scientist
Geoffrey William Hoffmann (born October 20, 1944) is an Australian-Canadian theoretical biologist. Hoffmann was a faculty member in the Department of Physics at the University of British Columbia and the founder of Network Immunology Inc. in Vancouver, Canada. He is best known for symmetric immune network theory.
Education and early research
Hoffmann studied physics at the University of Melbourne then obtained a PhD at the Technische Universität Braunschweig as a student of Manfred Eigen for research done at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.
His initial work in theoretical biology addressed Leslie Orgel's paradox in origin of life theories. Hoffmann showed that an early sloppy translation machinery can be stable against the error catastrophe envisaged by Orgel and provided analyses of the expected occurrence of required catalytic activities and exclusion of disruptive catalytic activities. These calculations support the view that the origin of replication and metabolism together is plausible.
Immune network theory
Hoffmann subsequently joined the Basel Institute for Immunology, where Niels Jerne had proposed that the immune system is a network, consisting of antibodies and lymphocytes that recognize not only things that are foreign to the body, but also each other. Immune network theory became, and remains, Hoffmann's primary research focus.
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