Geoffrey W. Hoffmann

Geoffrey W. Hoffmann
Born	October 20, 1944 Australia
Nationality	Australian-Canadian
Fields	Immune network theory
Influences	Manfred Eigen, Niels Jerne

Geoffrey W. Hoffmann, (born October 20, 1944) is an Australian-Canadian theoretical biologist. Hoffmann was a faculty member in the Department of Physics at the University of British Columbia and is currently chairman and chief scientist at Network Immunology Inc. in Vancouver, Canada. He is best known for symmetric immune network theory.

Hoffmann studied physics at the University of Melbourne then obtained a PhD at the Technische Universität Braunschweig as a student of Manfred Eigen for research done at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.

His initial work in theoretical biology addressed Leslie Orgel's paradox in origin of life theories. Hoffmann showed that an early sloppy translation machinery can be stable against the error catastrophe envisaged by Orgel and provided analyses of the expected occurrence of required catalytic activities and exclusion of disruptive catalytic activities. These calculations support the view that the origin of replication and metabolism together is plausible.

Hoffmann subsequently joined the Basel Institute for Immunology, where Niels Jerne had proposed that the immune system is a network, consisting of antibodies and lymphocytes that recognize not only things that are foreign to the body, but also each other. Immune network theory became, and remains, Hoffmann's primary research focus. He developed the symmetrical immune network theory based on Jerne’s hypothesis. This theory involves symmetrical stimulatory, inhibitory and killing interactions, and is a framework for understanding, using a small number of postulates, a number of immunological phenomena that are not readily explained otherwise.

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