Approaching the Asymptote? Evolution and Revolution in Immunology

  1. C.A. Janeway, Jr.
  1. Section of Immunology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Yale University School of Medicine New Haven, Connecticut 06510

This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.

Excerpt

It is a great privilege to introduce this Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on quantitative biology on the subject of immune recognition. My predecessors in this role, Macfarlane Burnet (1967) and Niels Jerne (1976), had a profound effect on the development of ideas in our field, and many of the participants have made great contributions to our understanding of the subject of this symposium and are clearly more qualified than I to introduce it.

The first Cold Spring Harbor Symposium to consider the immune system was held in 1967 on the subject of antibodies. It marked the acceptance of the clonal selection theory as the central paradigm of immunology (Jerne 1967). That meeting also brought together sufficient data on antibody structure to promote the idea that immunoglobulins are encoded in two distinct types of gene segments, variable segments and constant segments, and that a genetic mechanism must exist to direct the...

| Table of Contents