Immunology as Scholarly Discipline

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume 16 · Number 1 · Autumn 1912 IMMUNOLOGY AS SCHOLARLY DISCIPLINE* SIR MACFARLANE BURNETt It is now nearly fifty years since I became interested in immunology . Believe it or not, in 1923 I sketched out some ideas on how Semon's mnemic theory of memory, now forgotten, might be applied to antibody function. I showed them to my chief, C. H. Kellaway, who gave me John Hunter's advice to Jenner: "Don't think. Do the experiments." Well, I have done many experiments, but have never really stopped thinking about immunology since then. If I seem to be unduly enthusiastic or optimistic about immunology, I am certain that this is one audience that will forgive me, and when a heresy or two creep in, as they will, I hope that you will be tolerant also of them. The year 1923 was in many ways a good time to come into a hospital laboratory to begin a career in what was then called medical research. In Australia that tended to be a synonym for medical bacteriology and the related serological work. In those days there were still plenty of cases of typhoid fever in the wards, and my first publication was on H and O type agglutination in typhoid. That was the beginning of a continuing opportunity to watch at firsthand the development of immunology from where it stood after the great days of von Behring, Ehrlich, and Bordet at the turn of the century. I want to say a little about some of those who brought immunology to its present prosperous state, to look at how it has changed its pattern with the years, and to speculate in broad terms where it may be going next. I still find it impossible not to dream about the future of immunology, and, after all, I have seen one or two of my earlier * Keynote address, First International Congress of Immunology, Washington, D.C., August 1, 1971. t School of Microbiology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1972 | 1 dreams come true. Let me start with an outline of immunology around 1923-1925. In the first place it was concerned almost wholly with immunity against microorganismal infection. The fact that men with faces pocked by smallpox or milkmaids who had had the cowpox were immune (i.e., did not contract the disease on exposure to smallpox cases) remained the prototype situation, much as it had been in Jenner's time. The major current interests were in elucidating the nature of immunity to diphtheria and the process of recovery from pneumococcal pneumonia. The only significant activity outside the field of infectious disease, as such, was concerned with the occasional harmful effects of the increasing numbers of injections that medical treatment now called for. Iatrogenic disease probably first became significant in the form of serum sickness following injections of antitoxin and the reactions to incompatible or contaminated blood transfusions . It was already evident that the body resented the entry of foreign material, whether this was serum protein from a horse or red cells from a donor of incompatible blood group. Without any specific formulation of a doctrine beyond Ehrlich's phrase "horror autotoxicus ," the capacity of the organism to differentiate between self-components proper to the body and nonself-components was being tacitly accepted. Landsteiner, of course, was the leading spirit in sorting out the human blood groups. His recognition of what, in the last analysis , must have been chemical differences between cell surface components probably played a major part in bringing Landsteiner to the study of the immunological specificity of chemically defined haptens. From then onward the central themes of immunology were chemically oriented. Of course its medical applications were broadened and elaborated, but, after Landsteiner, immunology was no longer simply something that might be of value for preventing or curing infections. It had become, and has remained, primarily a field for scholarly enquiry . Antibody had been defined as a soluble protein, and when Tiselius developed the technique of quantitative electrophoresis it became gamma globulin. Thereafter the history of antibody studies has been essentially determined by the general progress of protein chemistry and...