Elie Metchnikoff Quotes

The production of antibody is not the only, nor I believe the most important, manifestation of immunity, but for reasons both historical and of experimental convenience, antibody is likely to remain the touchstone of immunological theory.

The body's immune system is like any other system of the body. Each of them have their vital function for the human host.

Many key concepts concerning the nature of immunity have originated from the very practical need to control virus infections.

What the immune system of man has in its advanced development is what we call immunological memory, so that once it sees something for the first time, when it sees it the second or the third time, it can respond against it in a way that's much more accelerated than when it sees it for the first time.

I like to read general biology - things about the immune system and advances in that area - because it lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue.

Immune system will heal itself.

I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally, the new immunology was born.

Autoimmunity is probably the next frontier. The majority of cases of autoimmune disease result from a complex genetic problem that has environmental influences. It is a colossal task for the immune system to maintain tolerance to self and yet be ready to react to everything in the world around us.

It's my personal opinion, and I'm not espousing it to anybody else, I think your immune system and how healthy you are determines how you react to any excess of any kind.

When an animal is infected, either naturally or by experimental injection, with a bacterium, virus, or other foreign body, the animal recognises this as an invader and acts in such a way as to remove or destroy it.

My interest was directed, from my medical student days, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity. I had suffered from bronchial asthma as a child and had developed a deep curiosity in allergic phenomena.

The right raw materials can... double or triple the protective power of the immune system.

Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work.

The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?

To manipulate the immune system, you need to find the key bottlenecks that govern the system. The T-cell is an absolute bottleneck.

Researchers have found that the brain definitely sends nerves directly to organs of the immune system and not just to the heart and the lower gut. In that way, too, the brain is influencing the body.

When you vaccinate someone, or when you get infected, the microbe is presenting itself to the immune system in a way that the immune system recognizes the important elements of the microbe and makes an immune response, both an antibody response and a cellular response, to ultimately contain the microbe.

The need to deal with pathogens has driven the evolution of the vertebrate immune system, so it should not be surprising that experiments with infectious agents have often illuminated key elements of the underlying mechanisms.

We found out that, contrary to what many people thought, in the immune system, genes can change during the life cycle of the individual.

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.

Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.

If we think of the immune system as a machine, then we are far from even knowing all of its parts.

Immunologists agreed that an individual vertebrate synthesizes many millions of structurally different forms of antibody molecules even before it encounters an antigen.

There are too few people working in the area of viral pathogenesis and immunity, too little funding, too many problems, and too little time.

A vaccine introduces a small amount or a tempered version of the virus into the body - just enough to that the body is able to recognize it and deal with it when it encounters it again in the future.