Hergen Spits—A legend at the top of his career.

Following an impressive career of T- and NK cell characterization, Hergen discovered multiple subsets of ILCs in humans and was essential in the realization that (A) the ILC family is a mirror image of the T-cell repertoire in terms of transcriptional requirements and effector functions. Keywords: basic immunology; basic mechanisms; T cells EN basic immunology basic mechanisms T cells 1925 1928 4 06/18/21 20210601 NES 210601 MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS Discovery of the role of adhesion and CD3 re-directed killing in T cell-mediated cytotoxicity (from 1980) Dissection of the mechanisms of thymic selection in human chimeras (from 1986) Elucidation of the role of IL-4 (from 1987) and IL-10 (from 1991) in immunoregulation Description of human T-, NK-, and dendritic cell ontogeny (from 1990) Immortalization of antigen-specific B cells for clonal production of high-affinity therapeutic antibodies (from 2004) Discovery of human innate lymphoid cell (ILCs) subsets, their differentiation and plasticity (from 2009) Hergen Spits' retirement symposium was held in the Zuiderkerk, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on 18 February 2019. It did not take long until Hergen had identified the human Th22 subset.3 In addition, Hergen quickly realized that the IL-22 production that he observed in the T-cell system had an equivalent among innate lymphocytes resembling NK cells. [Extracted from the article]