The following was excerpted from an obituary submitted by Rabyn Blake and written by his UCLA colleagues Kamal Moudgil, M.D. and Emanual Maverakis, M.D.
PHOTO COURTESY OF RABYN BLAKE  |
Eli Sercarz, Professor Emeritus of Immunology at the University of California, Los Angeles, the current Head of the Division of Immune Regulation at the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, and one of the most highly esteemed immunologists in the world, died on November 3 of renal cell cancer. He was 75.
Discovering why autoimmunity occurs was a major focus of Sercarz's research. His pioneering work helped define how immune cells respond to their targets in autoimmune diseases such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and type-1 diabetes.
Eli was born in New York to modest beginnings. His mother taught Yiddish and his father was a radiation technologist. As a child, he learned to love baseball. During World War II, he had a great fondness for maps, carefully plotting out every day the German army movements and following their path of destruction that would eventually lead to the death of his family living in Poland.
After graduating valedictorian from his high school, he continued his education at San Diego State University where he majored in Chemistry and met his first wife, Renan. In 1955 he left San Diego with his family to attend graduate studies at Harvard University where he became interested in bacterial genetics and cracking the genetic code. However, when he met Dr. Albert Coons, his research interests changed to immunology and he joined Coons' laboratory. After completing a short postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and then MIT, Eli was hired as an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he rose to the rarely achieved rank of "professor above scale."
During this time he divorced and married Rabyn Blake who would be his soul mate throughout the rest of his life.
After more than 30 years of service to UCLA, he retired from the UC system and accepted a position at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology (LIAI-San Diego) where he found himself among close friends, a small but star-studded group of outstanding immunologists. Five years later, he moved with his group to the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies. Sercarz was an avid lecturer and traveled the world delivering lectures and keynote addresses.
In fact, less than a month before his death, in a very frail state, Eli traveled to Greece to lecture at an Aegean Conference on Autoimmunity in Crete. Among numerous awards, he was twice the recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship and received the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2007, a testimony to the more than 100 scientists he trained.
Although metastatic undifferentiated renal cell cancer is usually deadly within a few months, Eli fought the disease for five years, designing his own treatments at a time when the medical community had long given up hope on him.
For those who had the privilege of knowing Eli, he will be remembered not only for his incredible science but even more for his loving and sweet personality. He was always the life of the party, sweeping anyone and everyone off their feet to dance and insuring that there was enough good food and especially good cheese for everyone. He is survived by his children, Joel, Lisa and Sarayana, his beloved wife, Rabyn, and her sons, Charles and Andrew Sheldon. His daughter, Margo, died in 2001 of an autoimmune disease.
