Zinkernagel was born on January 6, 1944, in Basel, Switzerland. In 1962, he attended the University of Basel, deciding to study medicine rather than chemistry--his other great interest--because the former profession offered the possibility of clinical or private practice as well as research. He passed his final boards in 1968 and in 1970, the university accepted his M.D. dissertation.

In 1969 Zinkernagel's work in the surgery department of a hospital in Basel failed to spark his interest. He began looking around for other possible career paths. From 1970 to 1973 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in a laboratory studying the process by which the immune system kills virus-infected cells. Zinkernagel's project, trying to monitor the destruction of bacterial cells preloaded with radioactive chromium-51, was frustrating because the method never worked properly on the bacteria--but it gave him experience with a number of experimental techniques that were to prove...