A request: I am looking for your favorite attempt to "put it all
together."
I came across Golub's _Immunology: a Synthesis_ first edition. He
ends it with Gershon's cartoons of the immunological orchestra. It
seems to me that there were many more attempts to get a handle on how
the various parts of an immune system hang together in the 70s and 80s.
Now we are in a phase of accumulating cell surface markers (driven in
large measure by FACS analysis) and examining individual clones that
represent particular actors in story.
What is lost by this approach? Certainly we are not really
learning as much about the details of the populational nature of immune
response, many specificities, many on rates competing with each other,
etc... Everyone would acknowledge the importance of the catalog (of
ILs and CDs and ...) that we are building. But I am looking for some
contemporary syntheses of this work.
Thank you.
Jeremy Creighton Ahouse
Biology and Center for Complex Systems
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA 02254-9110