Gene Shearer

When the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic was first identified, Shearer realized that the immune deficiencies occurring in AIDS patients closely resembled the immune deficiencies occurring in experimental murine models of graft versus host disease that he had been studying. Consequently, in 1983 Shearer was one of the first immunologists to begin studying the immune dysregulation in AIDS patients and discovered that infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) resulted in CD4+ T cell dysfunction and immune dysregulation long before the onset of overt clinical disease. At the height of the AIDS epidemic when public concern about HIV exposure was at its peak, Shearer's research revealed that T cell immunity to HIV was protective, providing hope to an increasingly concerned public that HIV infection could be contained.

Shearer lives in Bethesda, MD. He married Minetta Stone in 1966; they have two sons. Shearer's interests include cycling and playing autoharp and harmonica with his musical group, the Half-Right Band.

Shearer was born and raised in Monticello in rural Kentucky. In 1961, he earned a B.Sc. degree in biology at Western Kentucky State College and, in 1967, earned a Ph.D. in Radiation Biology from the University of Tennessee Knoxville in the laboratory of Gustavo Cudkowicz with whom he studied lymphoid stem cells. After a post-doctoral fellowship examining genetic regulation of immune responses to synthetic protein antigens with Michael Sela at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, Shearer started his own laboratory in 1972 at the National Cancer Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Shearer published nearly 500 research papers in both basic and clinical immunology from his laboratory and trained over 50 postdoctoral fellows and students before retiring in 2014 at age 77 from the National Cancer Institute's Experimental Immunology Branch of which he was a founding member.

Gene Martin Shearer (born April 14, 1937) is an American immunologist who works at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He first achieved fame for his discovery in 1974 that T lymphocytes recognized chemically modified surface antigens only in the context of self major histocompatibility complex (MHC) encoded molecules, identifying the central feature of antigen recognition by T lymphocytes known as MHC restriction. His discovery of MHC restriction using chemically modified surface antigens was simultaneous with the discovery of MHC restricted T lymphocyte recognition of virus infected cells by Rolf Zinkernagel and Peter Doherty, who received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.