By Alfred I. Tauber
The Immune Self is a serious examine of immunology from its origins on the finish of the 19th century to its modern formula. The ebook bargains the 1st prolonged philosophical critique of immunology, within which the functionality of the time period ''self'' that underlies the constitution of present immune conception is analyzed. even though, this research is punctiliously built-in right into a extensive survey of the main medical advancements in immunology, a dialogue in their ancient context, and a overview of the conceptual arguments that experience molded this subtle smooth technology.
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Example text
By 1890 the debate was polarized not so much over the notion of active defense as a principle of immunity, although that issue was still unresolved, but most clearly over the mechanism by which the host dealt with pathogens. The celebrated debate between the immunological cellularists, led by Metchnikoff, and the German humoralists was in full swing at the meeting (Mazumdar 1972; Silverstein 1989). The polemics were aggressive, with each side stubbornly defending its rigid position. Metchnikoff's intense persona is perhaps most vividly presented in Paul de Kruif's popular narrative The Microbe Hunters (de Kruif 1926, 1954).
For almost twenty years, his embryologic studies to define the mesoderm in invertebrates, assign genealogical relationships, establish a model of the first metazoan, and contribute to the exciting debate on the nature of evolutionary mechanisms initiated by Darwin's On the Origin of Species may be traced as logically culminating in the phagocytosis theory. Metchnikoff's theory of host defense applied to the newly discovered germ theory was rigorously denied by the German microbiologists (Silverstein 1989; Tauber and Chernyak 1989).
By 1908, when he shared the Nobel Prize with Ehrlich, Metchnikoff's scientific achievements were well recognized: The phagocyte was generally accepted as an important element in immune effector function. But Metchnikoff maintained a more radical position, that the host, through the vehicle of the phagocyte, as28 The phagocytosis theory serted itself and strived for (in his terms) internal harmony, by active mechanisms, among which the immunologic reaction against a pathogen was but one incidental example.