Elvin A. Kabat

Elvin Abraham Kabat was an American biomedical scientist and one of the founding fathers of modern quantitative immunochemistry. Kabat was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1977 and the National Medal of Science in 1991. He is the father of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He was the president of the American Association of Immunologists from 1965 to 1966, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He laid the foundations of the Kabat numbering scheme, a scheme for the numbering of amino acid residues in antibodies based upon variable regions. In 1969, he started collecting and aligning amino acid sequences of human and mouse Bence Jones proteins and immunoglobulin light chains in 1969. In 1995 he was awarded the American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award.