Brigitte Askonas

Education Brigitte Askonas was born to Czechoslovak parents, Jewish converts to Catholicism, who fled Austria after the Nazi takeover. Vienna-born Askonas studied biochemistry at McGill University (BSc, MSc) and carried out her postgraduate work in the school of biochemistry at the University of Cambridge where she was a student of Girton College, Cambridge and worked in Frederick Sanger's laboratory from 1948 to 1952.

Her role models in the department included two distinguished scientists, Marjory Stephenson and Dorothy Needham,

During that time, she worked extensively with fellow immunologist John H. Humphrey to establish the immunology divisions. Askonas focused on B cells and determined their role in producing antibodies as part of the immune response.

At the NIMR she began researching the biosynthesis of polypeptides in milk proteins discovering that the peptides were synthesised from amino acids rapidly in one piece. César Milstein and John Herbert Humphrey. Askonas conducted a filmed interview with Stanley Peart as a segment of what became the Medical Sciences Video Archive housed in the special collections of the library at Oxford Brookes University.

Awards and honours

2007: Foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 2007: Robert Koch Gold Medal . 1973: Elected Fellow of the Royal Society