Zoltan Ovary, who died Sunday at 98, was a pioneering immunologist at New York University whose work on immunoglobin in guinea pigs helped lay the groundwork for modern discoveries connecting allergies to the immune system.

A prolific scientist with more than 300 scientific papers to his credit, he worked in his laboratory until a week before his death. According to the International Union of Immunological Societies, Ovary was the “oldest fully employed immunologist in the world.”

Ovary was born in Transylvania – then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now a part of Romania. With the dislocations of World War II, the redrawing of borders, and his own peripatetic wanderings as both a refugee and researcher, Ovary was a citizen of six or seven nations, according to Susan Zolla-Pazner, a colleague who knew him for many years.

Trained as a medical doctor, Ovary was working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris at the outbreak of the war, and returned home. He was eventually conscripted in the Wehrmacht in 1944 as a medical officer, charged with fighting typhus. At the end of the war, he arranged an appointment at the University Clinica Medica di Roma, where he was on staff while holding another appointment at the Pasteur Institute. It was during this period that Ovary began measuring the quantities of antibodies needed to provoke an allergic reaction in guinea pigs.The research, conducted with Guido Biozzi, introduced a technique called passive cutaneous anaphylaxis, which allowed scientists for the first time to isolate and study the antibodies that cause allergic reactions. More recently, he investigated the way in which T-cells regulate the production of antibodies. The director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Lloyd Old, said, “The only precedent I know for such persistent and distinguished scholarship in the field of immunology is Michael Heidelberger, the father of immunochemistry and a dear friend of Zoltan’s, who continued his research until the age of 103.”

In 1954, Ovary came to America as a Fulbright Scholar at Johns Hopkins, and in 1959 he joined the pathology department at NYU.

Ovary cultivated a wide range of friends, including the author and biologist Lewis Thomas at NYU and the philanthropist Alice Tully, whom he took to meet another friend in Rome, the Princess Pallavincini.

He was the sort of man who cultivated friends both eminent and titled in far-flung locations. He enjoyed exotic travel, including African safaris. Among his contributions to the university was the establishment of an artist-in-residence program, which brought musicians to the medical school to play for students.

Because of his unusual last name, Ovary regularly popped up in lists of people whose names are unusually appropriate to their profession, a field technically known as onomastics. In most such lists, Ovary was misidentified as a gynecologist.

Zoltan Ovary
Born April 13, 1907, in Kolozsvar (now Cluj), the capital of Transylvania; died Sunday in Manhattan; there are no survivors.