Holger Fehr wrote to Jamie:
> I would agree that Polly Matzinger's "danger" model is worth to be discussed
> in a wider public. It therefore might be usefull if you would us give > some citations on the original and some newer articles on that topic.
Hello,
BEFORE we all go rushing to the literature, why not do
a bit of thinking? What is "danger"? It is a word applied when
one has a certain sort of information about something. For example,
as you approach a sunny beach you might be confronted with a sign
saying "DANGER. LAND-MINES". In order to write that sign, someone
had to discern that among the objects on the beach there were some
compatible with humans (sand, pebbles, weed), and some incompatible
("land-mines").
Thus, first there was a binary discrimination event. The
decision to use the "D-word" either followed or did not follow
this event. In biological systems, a convenient nomenclature
for this binary decision-making process is that it involves
discrimination between "self" and "not-self".
The ability to carry out this discrimination is SO important
that it is likely to have arisen among the very first living forms
(unicellular). The mechanisms which evolved there may then have been
modified and adapted when multicellular organisms arose.
That's enough for a start. NOW let's go and read the literature!
For a start we could do worse than visit the web-site below.
Sincerely,
Donald Forsdyke. Discussion Leader. Bionet.immunology
http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/cancimm1.htm
