A Living History of Immunology: New Frontiers in Immunology Research Topic

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Frontiers Communications in Health // 0 Comments

A new Frontiers in Immunology Research Topic brings together the stories of those at the forefront of modern-day immunology

“In the highly competitive world of biomedical science, often the rush to publish and to be recognized as ‘first’ with a new discovery, concept or method is lost in the hurly burly of the moment, as ‘the maddening crowd’ moves on to the next ‘new thing’. One of the great things about immunology today is that it has only matured as a science within the last half-century, and especially within the past 35 years as a consequence of the revolution of molecular immunology, which has taken place only since 1980. Consequently, most of those who have contributed to our new understanding of how the immune system functions are still alive and well, and still contributing.

“‘A Living History of Immunology’ intends to collate as many stories as possible from the investigators who actually performed the experiments that have established the frontiers of immunology. Accordingly, we are after the ‘truth’, to combat ‘revisionist science’, by those who want to alter history by telling the stories a different way than actually happened. In this regard, one of the good things about science versus other disciplines is that we have the written record of what was done, when it was done and by whom. Even so we do not have the complete story or narrative of how and why experiments were done, and what made the differences that led to success. This Research Topic is meant to chronicle these stories in the past fifty years in immunology.”

– Kendall A Smith, Frontiers in Immunology Field Chief Editor

Published articles:

Kendall A Smith: Revisiting the first long-term culture of tumour-specific cytotoxic lymphocytes
Jacques F A P Miller: Revisiting Thymus Function
Nicholas A Mitchison: The discovery of T cell-B cell cooperation
Edward A Clark: A short history of the B cell-associated surface molecule CD40
Harald Von Boehmer: Deciphering thymic development
Toshio Hirano: Revisiting the 1986 molecular cloning of interleukin 6
Donald Mosier: The Story Behind “A Requirement for Two Cell Types for Antibody Formation In Vitro”.
R Chris Bleackley: Cloning CTL-Specific Genes (and now for something completely differential)
Joost J. Oppenheim: Evolution of the Serendipitous Discovery of Macrophage-Lymphocyte Interactions
Richard W Dutton: In Vitro studies of the antibody response: antibodies of different specificity are made in different populations of cells.