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Overview
- Written in an elegant style by long-time practicing immunologist
- Discusses the changing theories and technologies that guided the field
- Tells of the exciting disputes among prominent scientists
- Lists all the important discoveries and books in the field
- Explains in detail the many Nobel prize-winning contributions of immunologists
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780080919461 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Elsevier Science |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 552 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Read an Excerpt
A History of Immunology
By Arthur M. Silverstein
Academic Press
Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Inc.All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-08-091946-1
Chapter One
Theories of acquired immunityBlut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft.
Goethe
The Latin words immunitas and immunis have their origin in the legal concept of an exemption: initially in ancient Rome they described the exemption of an individual from service or duty, and later in the Middle Ages the exemption of the Church and its properties and personnel from civil control. In her impressive review of the "History of Concepts of Infection and Defense," Antoinette Stettler traces the first use of this term in the context of disease to the fourteenth century, when Colle wrote "Equibus Dei gratia ego immunis evasi" in referring to his escape from a plague epidemic. However, long before that, poetic license permitted the Roman Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (39–65 AD) to use the word immunes in his epic poem "Pharsalia," to describe the famous resistance to snakebite of the Psylli tribe of North Africa. While the term was employed intermittently thereafter, it did not attain great currency until the nineteenth century, following the rapid spread of Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccination. Immunity was thus an available and apt term to employ during the 1880s and 1890s regarding the phenomena described by Pasteur, Koch, Metchnikoff, von Behring, Ehrlich, and other investigators. But long before any specific term such as immunity was applied, and some 1500 years before an explanation of it would be advanced, the phenomenon of acquired immunity was described.
Throughout recorded history, two of the most fearful causes of death were pestilence and poison. With great frequency, deadly epidemics and pandemics visited upon cities and nations, with enormous economic, social, and political consequences. Despite a lack of knowledge of their origin, their nature, or even their nosologic relationship to one another, the keen observer could not help but notice that often those who by good fortune had survived the disease once might be "exempt" from further involvement upon its return. Thus the historian Thucydides, in his contemporary description of the plague of Athens of 430 BC, could say:
Yet it was with those who had recovered from the disease that the sick and the dying found most compassion. These knew what it was from experience, and had now no fear for themselves; for the same man was never attacked twice–never at least fatally.
The identity of this "plague" which killed Pericles and perhaps one-quarter of the population of Athens has been much disputed, and it is uncertain that it was due to Pasteurella pestis. However, some thousand years later, a pandemic of what is more likely to have been bubonic plague occurred in 541 AD, and is known as the Plague of Justinian after the Byzantine emperor of that time. In his history, Procopius said of the plague:
... it left neither island nor cave nor mountain ridge which had human inhabitants; and if it had passed by any land, either not affecting the men there or touching them in indifferent fashion, still at a later time it came back; then those who dwelt roundabout this land, whom formerly it had afflicted most sorely, it did not touch at all....
And, after a further millenium, Fracastoro (1483–1553) felt free to offer the following tantalizing comment in his book On Contagion:
Moreover, I have known certain persons who were regularly immune, though surrounded by the plague-stricken, and I shall have something to say about this in its place, and shall inquire whether it is impossible for us to immunize ourselves against pestilential fevers.
Unfortunately Fracastoro, despite his promise to return to this intriguing suggestion, failed to do so later in the book.
Man's continuous experience with poisons has also had a far-reaching influence on the development of concepts of disease and immunity. During Roman times, Mithridates VI, King of Pontus, described in his medical commentaries (which his conqueror Pompey thought worthy of translation) the taking of increasing daily doses of poisons to render himself safe from attempts on his life. This immunity (or adaptation) had far-reaching influence throughout the Middle Ages, when complicated mixtures for this purpose were universally known as the Mithridaticum or theriac. Indeed, as we shall see below, its influence was felt as late as the 1890s, when an adaptation theory of immunity was advanced, based upon Mithridatic principles.
Even more important was the centuries-long belief that many diseases were due to poison, known universally by its Latin name virus. (The Greek word pharmakeia still means poisoning, witchcraft, or medicine.) In the absence of knowledge of etiology or pathogenesis, the causative agent was long considered to be the virus, connoting not only poison but also the slime and miasma from which the poison was thought to originate. Even into the early twentieth century, the term "virus" was used almost interchangeably with "bacterium" to describe the etiologic agent of an infectious disease. When, in 1888, Roux and Yersin isolated diphtheria toxin, and in 1890 von Behring and Kitasato described antitoxic immunity to diphtheria and tetanus, it appeared for a brief period that almost 2,000 years of interest in poison as the proximate cause of disease and in antidotes (German: Gegengifte) had been vindicated. However, the discovery soon there-after of numerous diseases whose pathogenesis was based neither upon an exotoxin nor endotoxin led to an early correction of this over-generalization, although not before Paul Ehrlich had done his classical studies on immunity to the plant poisons abrin and ricin.
Most textbooks of immunology begin with a short historical review, mention variolation and Jenner's vaccination against smallpox, but imply that theories of acquired immunity had to await Pasteur's germ theory of disease and his first demonstration in 1880 of acquired immunity in the etiologically well-defined bacterial infection of chicken cholera. This may be due in part to the surprising failure to find any hint of speculation in Jenner's writing on what he thought was the mechanism of vaccination in providing immunity to smallpox. Le Fanu suggests that Jenner might have been influenced by the belief of his famous teacher John Hunter that two diseases cannot coexist in an individual, or perhaps he took seriously Hunter's advice in an earlier letter to Jenner on another subject: "I think your solution is just, but why think? Why not try the experiment?"
A "modern" theory of acquired immunity would seem to require, as minimal prerequisites:
1. The concept of an etiologic agent
2. A concept of transmission of this agent
3. An understanding of the specificity and general reproducibility of a disease
4. Some concept of host–parasite interaction.
However, as Stettler points out, there were earlier theories of acquired immunity. These appear to have required an awareness of only two factors: a recognition of the phenomenon of inability to succumb twice during the course of a pestilence, and some concept, however primitive, of disease pathogenesis (plus, of course, a speculative mind). We shall, in this chapter, expand upon Stettler's list, and examine these imaginative theories within the context of their times.
Magic and theurgic origin of disease
As Sigerist points out in his A History of Medicine, there is only a nebulous border between magic and religion among primitive peoples. In the most primitive societies, both man and nature are thought to operate under the control of magical influences governed by spirits and demons. These become formalized into sets of taboos and totems, followed often by the development of complex pantheons, and occasionally by a monotheistic unification. It is only natural, then, as Temkin indicates, that in such ancient civilizations as Egypt, India, Israel, and Mesopotamia disease came to be considered a punishment for trespass or sin, ranging from the involuntary infraction of some taboo to a willful crime against gods or men. The wearing of amulets, the chanting of incantations, and the offering of sacrifice were common measures to neutralize "black" magic, to ward off demonic disease, or to propitiate the gods, and such practices persist to the present time, even among "advanced" peoples.
Throughout recorded history, every civilization has recognized the theurgic origin of disease. The Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, about 2000 BC, records visitations of the god of pestilence, while in Egypt the fear of Pharaoh was compared with the fear of the god of disease during a year of severe epidemics. Throughout the Old Testament, God visits disease upon those who deserve punishment, including both His own people and those who oppose them. Thus, God through Moses smote the Egyptians (Exodus 9:9), the Philistines for their seizure of the Ark of the Covenant (I Samuel 5:6), and the Assyrians under King Sennacherib for invading Judea (Isaiah 37:36), but God equally brought down a pestilence that killed 70,000 people as punishment of David's sin of numbering the people (II Samuel 24). In ancient Greece, Sophocles records in "Oedipus the King" that the Sun god Phoebus Apollo caused the plague of Thebes because it had been polluted by the misdeeds of Oedipus, while the historians record that Apollo fired plague arrows upon the Greek host before Troy because their leader Agamemnon had abducted the daughter of his priest. Among Hindus also, sin, the breaking of a norm, the wanton cursing of a fellow man, and similar transgressions result in illness, for the gods – and particularly Varuna, guardian of law and order – punish the offender.
With the concept of a vengeful deity, and especially with the rise of a belief in a hereafter in which a life of earthly suffering might be followed by everlasting peace, the view of the nature of disease and of resistance to it underwent a significant change in early Christian times. While the opening of Pandora's Box might only have released disease-as-punishment into the world, Eve's eating of the forbidden fruit did more: it permitted redemption. Now not only did God punish the sins of man with disease, but He could also employ it to purge and cleanse man of his sins. Thus St Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (?200–258 AD) could write of the plague then raging:
Many of us are dying in this mortality, that is many of us are being freed from the world.... To the servants of God it is a salutary departure. How suitable, how necessary it is that this plague, which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the justice of each and every one ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A History of Immunology by Arthur M. Silverstein Copyright © 2009 by Elsevier Inc. . Excerpted by permission of Academic Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
PART ONE: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY1. Theories of Acquired Immunity
2. Cellular vs. Humoral Immunity
3. Theories of Antibody Formation
4. The Generation of Diversity: The Germline/Somatic Mutation Debate
5. The Clonal Selection Theory Challenged: The Immunological Self
6. The Concept of Immunologic Specificity
7. Specificity Continued
8. Horror Autotoxicus: The Concept of Autoimmunity
9. Allergy and Immunopathology: The "Price" of Immunity
10. Anti-Antibodies and Anti-Idiotypic Immunoregulation: 1899-1904
11. Transplantation and Immunogenetics
PART TWO: SOCIAL HISTORY
12. Magic Bullets and Poisoned Arrows: The Uses of Antibodies
13. The Royal Experiment: 1721-22
14. The Languages of Immunologic Dispute
15. The Search for Cell-Bound Antibodies. On the Influence of Dogma
16. Natural' Antibodies and 'Virgin' Lymphocytes: The Importance of Context
17. The Dynamics of Conceptual Change in Immunology
18. Immunology in Transition 1951-1972: The Role of International Meetings and Discipline Leaders
19. The Origin of Subdisciplines: (Ocular Immunology; Pediatric Immunology; Immunophysiology)
20. Immune Hemolysis: On the Heuristic Value of an Experimental System
21. Darwinism and Immunology: from Metchnikoff to Burnet
22. The End of Immunology?
Appendix A1. The Calendar of Immunologic Progress
Appendix A2. Seminal Discoveries
Appendix A3. Important Books in Immunology, 1892 – 1968
Appendix B. Nobel Prize Highlights in Immunology
Appendix C. Biographical Dictionary
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