Hoffmann was a faculty member in the Department of Physics at the University of British Columbia and the founder of Network Immunology Inc. in Vancouver, Canada.
Hoffmann studied physics at the University of Melbourne then obtained a PhD at the Technische Universität Braunschweig as a student of Manfred Eigen for research done at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.
Hoffmann subsequently joined the Basel Institute for Immunology, where Niels Jerne had proposed that the immune system is a network, consisting of antibodies and lymphocytes that recognize not only things that are foreign to the body, but also each other.
[7][8][9][10] Hoffmann noted many similarities between the immune system and the brain, including that: The analogy resulted in the discovery of a neural network in which neurons exhibit hysteresis [11] and thus can learn without synaptic modification.
He argues that such processes occur in all societies, democratic or not, and can be counteracted by increased contact between individual citizens across national or cultural divides.