The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?
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.
You can put a kidney in your body - and somewhere down the line, your body might reject it.
The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.
I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally the new immunology was born. This is a science which to me has far greater potentialities both for practical use in medicine and for the better understanding of living process than the classical immunochemistry which it is incorporating and superseding.
The immune system has evolved the capacity to react specifically with a very large number of foreign molecules with which it had no previous contact while avoiding reactivity for autologous molecules, naturally antigenic in other species or in other individuals of the same species.
I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally, the new immunology was born.
What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences.
