The Interaction between Immunology and Transplant Surgery (and Other Matters)

Transplantation immunologists owe a debt to basic immunology. The first major input was Medawar's proof of the immunologic nature of skin allograft rejection in rabbits, followed by the discovery of immunologic tolerance. Tolerance was incorporated into the latest theories of antibody formation and it became a central plank of Burnet's clonal selection hypothesis. This development gave immunology a new direction in that it turned away from its preoccupation with the physical chemistry of antibodies and redirected toward events at the cellular level. Together with the earlier work of Chase and Landsteiner, Mitchison and the Medawar team were instrumental in establishing the cellular school of immunology when they showed that immunity to tumor and skin allografts could be adoptively transferred to animals that had never seen the histocompatibility antigens. Cellular immunology became a dominant field of study in the 1950s and 1960s and led to the importance of lymphocytes and their subpopulations.