Aging of Adaptive/Acquired Immunity

Abstract

It is appropriate to begin this chapter by quoting from an article (1) written by Philippa Marrack and John Kappler:

Spurred on by the great immunochemists of the early twentieth century, immunologists acted for many years as though one antigen was as good as another. Antigens were used because they were cheap or convenient, so we learned a lot about the properties of immunity to materials such as sheep red blood cells, egg albumin, dinitrophenol, and so on. What immunologists found out, of course, was tremendously important, and most of the principles that are the foundation of modern immunology were learned with these models. This course of action, however, was to some extent misleading, because the fact of the matter is that, in real life, most infectious organisms have spent their millions of years of coevolution with the immune system developing mechanisms of manipulating the system. The upshot is that no invading organism behaves exactly like a sheep red blood cell and, if immunologists really want to understand how infectious diseases interact with their hosts, they have to study the disease and host themselves. Artificial substitutes simply will not do.

It seems inconceivable that future generations will be able to discard B lymphocytes and immunoglobulin as absurd interpretations of reality, in much the same way as we today discard the four humours of Hippocratic medicine.

—John W. Fabre, “The Last Unknown Fact,” Nature Immunology 2002;3:3