Chairman’s Summing up

Abstract

Are there questions people want to bring up relating to the general theme of how the T cell and B cell get together, we could talk about CD4, if not I had lunch with Alan McGregor and he sort of said where are you going to go in the future and so I made a quick trip to Delphi and saw the Delphi Oracle. The Delphi Oracle told me three things; the first was to finish with this business which I think is a bit of a disease now which we call liganditis, its being preoccupied with receptors and ligands as the be all and end all of immunology. There is a very real issue which is, what was years ago called second signals, and I briefly outlined thinking on that in my comment on Steve Fling’s talk that understanding the activation of T cells once you have finished liganditis is largely a matter of second signals and I would like to just recount if you will one of the interesting diabetes studies that’s been published in the last year and that’s in transgenic mouse experiments. Many people have put alien MHC genes into the pancreatic islets and as far as I am aware to date, no-one has produced an immunological diabetes by that means, in other words the ligand is not sufficient to generate the disease.