Gerald Edelman pictured with a model of an antibody. Gerald Maurice Edelman (July 1, 1929) is an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. He has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system and his later work in neuroscience and in philosophy of mind.