Background
MCNEER, JAMES was born on May 17, 1924 in Huntington, West Virginia, United States.
MCNEER, JAMES was born on May 17, 1924 in Huntington, West Virginia, United States.
West Virginia University. Concord College; Washington & Lee University (Bachelor of Laws 1948). Phi Alpha Delta. Member, Board of Editors, Washington & Lee Law Review, 19471948.
Member Harrison County Bar Association (President, 1968). West Virginia State Bar (Member, State Legal Ethics Committee, 1974-1985. Member, Board of Governors, 1985-1988).
Federation of Insurance Counsel. Defense Research Institute. Defense Trial Counsel of West Virginia, Inc.
He then became professor of experimental pathology at Oxford. In 1977, he left his research career for ten years to be secretary of the Medical Research Council. He served as Secretary General of the Human Frontier Science Program in 1989.
He made significant discoveries about the role of lymphocytes in the immune response. In particular, he showed that some lymphocytes were not short-lived, as previously assumed, but moved from the blood into the lymphatic system and back. On the initiative of Peter Medawar he also undertook experiments on rats that showed that lymphocytes play an important role in transplant rejection.
In 1963 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted in 1982. In 1980 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine. In 1974 he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize.
[Royal Society]
He was a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences and received several honorary doctorates.