He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Natural Sciences in 1974.
During this time, and at Hartley’s suggestion, he visited the South African biologist Sydney Brenner at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge.
Their discussions drew Neuberger back to the LMB in 1980 and he remained there for the rest of his career, eventually becoming its deputy director.
Following the identification of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) by Honjo and Durandy as the protein essential for both of those processes, Michael produced a series of seminal papers during 2002 that laid bare the mechanism that had perplexed immunologists for 30 years.”[7] Michael Neuberger married Gillian Anne (Gill) Pyman, an Australian doctor, on 6 September 1991.
"At his request, he was buried in a Jewish consecrated grave in the grounds of the Baptist oratory, next to his family weekend home in Suffolk.