Richard Lerner, pioneering chemist and Scripps leader, dead at 83

Richard Lerner, the longtime president of Scripps Research and recipient of “Spain’s Nobel,” has died at 83. His legacy includes combinatorial antibody libraries, an approach that revolutionized the field of antibody development and led to the development of some of the best-selling drugs in history.

“These libraries are essentially an immune system in a test tube and enable the selection of antibodies without the constraints of whole animal or cell-based systems,” Lerner wrote in a 2016 review article...