Concluding remarks

Abstract

It was the XVIIIth Century English writer, Samuel Johnson, who remarked that ‘nothing so concentrates a man’s mind as the immediate prospect of hanging’. I certainly have had my mind concentrated marvellously over the last two days by the prospect of preparing this summing-up, almost 20 pages of detailed notes. I hope in the next few minutes, if you’ll be patient with me, to try and go through the headlines of what I have learned - and I certainly have learned a great deal in this excellent and timely meeting. Let’s begin at the beginnin - the tough end for me, because my appreciation of what was said in the first three talks by Dr. Carson, Dr. Bona and Dr. Agnello, was perhaps at a lower level than in some of the later ones. Table I reminds us that the anti-globulins, both rheumatoid factors and the anti- idiotypic antibodies, - and some of the differences between these two seem to blur a little during the meeting, as we’ll hear in a minute - are part of normal living. They are not freaks of nature, they are something that we all have, all the time. They are physiological, concerned with immunoregulation, present almost at birth, and any role they may play in clinical disease is a perturbation of normal immunoregulation, rather than a qualitatively new phenomenon.