This article discusses the general history of allergy and immunology. Due to the fact that such subject is broad complex, it is divided into sections of timeline. The first section begins from 1798 (smallpox vaccination) until 1894 (Pfeiffer’s bacteriolysis). The second timeline section continues from 1900 (Ehrlich’s antibody formation theory) until 1949 (immunological tolerance hypothesis). The third section begins from 1951 (discovery of yellow fever vaccine) until 1976 (identification of somatic recombination of immunoglobin genes).
The last timeline section continues from 1983 (HIV discovery) until 2005 (development of human papillomavirus vaccine). Along the discussion, major milestones of the history of allergy and immunology have been highlighted. I. Background The continual, cruel, yet abundantly productive process of evolution has given us the phenomenon of man. With tactless arrogance we imagine ourselves to represent the peak in biological achievement.
Thus far, regardless of the extraordinary control over environmental forces which our species gained over the millennia, one specter, with immeasurable effects on the course of history, stayed a daily threat to human happiness and survival right up to the present century. This was infectious disease, and particularly epidemic disease. The viruses and bacteria responsible for typhoid, plague, smallpox, cholera, and poliomyelitis represented enemies more understated and more dangerous than the elements or the larger predators.
To the historians of the future, the fundamental eradication of the major infectious diseases as major causes of fatality in Western communities will certainly rank as one of the key indications of this extraordinary century. This conquest can be attributed to the comparable development of the twin sciences microbiology and immunology. The primary “golden age of immunology,” in fact, had its origins in the latter part of the 19th century. This was the period of Louis Pasteur and rabies vaccination, the anti-diphtheria sera of von Behring and Wernicke, and Ehrlich and Metchnikoff digging into the academic aspects of bodily defenses.
A rapid practical expansion of immunization procedures and significant progress in experimentation on antibodies, the protective protein molecules poured into the bloodstream following vaccination occurred during the first two decades of the twentieth century. By the mid-1930s, immunization had attained extensive public acceptance and the attention in disease control altered to the sulphonamides and immediately to the even more magical antibiotics. After its first golden age, many have thought that the heyday of immunology was over but the 1950 decade marked the beginning of the second golden age and is currently on its ascendancy phase.
Edward Jenner History of immunology begun when a British physician named Edward Jenner developed a vaccine against smallpox on 1796. It was during the time that smallpox was a major cause of death. He observed that dairymaids who had been infected with a mild pustular skin infection known as cowpox were thereafter confident that they could never be stricken with smallpox, and the local experience (or, at least, the folklore) seemed to corroborate the connection.
After a decade of theorizing and empirical observation, Jenner undertook his famous experiment on May 14, 1796, injecting eight-year-old James Phipps of Berkeley with cowpox pus obtained from lesions on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes. When later Phipps turned out to have robust immunity against smallpox variolation attempts, Jenner published his thesis and recommendations. Despite some public resistance in publicizing his negative findings, smallpox vaccination was soon accepted spreading through Europe and North America.
With Jenner’s collaboration with a romanticist poet, Robert Bloomfield, the news on vaccination spread from country to the town-based public praising Jenner as a military hero along with the publication of the poem about vaccination. 1 2) Paul Ehrlich’s Mast Cells The next wave of development in immunology came during the time of Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich’s chief contribution to medicine was his side-chain theory of immunity, which established the chemical basis for the specificity of the immune response.
The side-chain theory was an attempt to account for the ability of certain toxins both to produce a toxic effect and to elicit a specific immune response in mammals. Ehrlich postulated that cells have specific receptor molecules, or side chains, on their surfaces that bind only to certain chemical groups in toxin molecules; if the cells survive this binding they produce side chains in excess, some of them being released as circulating antitoxins, or what today would be called antibodies, in the blood.
This theory laid the foundation for modern theories of immunity. Ehrlich also made great contributions in the field of chemotherapy, including using “606,” the so-called magic bullet known as Salvarsan, or organic arsenic, to treat syphilis. Mast cells were first described by Paul Ehrlich in 1878 on the basis of their unique staining characteristics and large granules. Mast cells have been considered by Carol Potera’s Engineering Allergy Relief to be the key players in allergic reactions (Potera 2003).
2 These granules also led him to the mistaken belief that they existed to nourish the surrounding tissue, and he named them “mastzellen,” meaning “feeding-cells. ” Nowadays, they are considered part of the immune system. Mast cells are very similar to basophil granulocytes (a class of white blood cells) in blood; the similarities between mast cells and basophils has led many to speculate that mast cells are basophils that have “homed in” on tissues.
However, current evidence suggests that they are generated by different precursor cells in the bone marrow3(p151). Nevertheless, both mast cells and basophils are thought to originate from bone marrow precursors expressing the CD34 molecule. The basophil leaves the bone marrow already mature while the mast cell circulates in an immature form, only maturing once in a tissue site. The tissue site an immature mast cell chooses to settle in probably determines its precise characteristics.