A Contribution to the Nature and Origin of Natural Agglutinins

[摘要] Introduction. The controversy over the origin of natural antibodies has been in progress ever since Hirszfeld and his associates (29, 30) seriously questioned the concept of latent infection as the immediate cause. According to these workers, natural antibodies are “biochemical organs” which appear in the serum, very much like physiologic reflexes, at a certain time in the life of the individual and are inherited according to Mendelian laws. Shortly following this came the contributions of Friedberger, Bock and Furstenheim (21) and many others (10, 23, 62) showing a correlation between the age of an individual and the rise and fall of certain natural antibodies in the serum. The important work done on natural antibodies up to 1932 was thoroughly reviewed by Baumgartner in her paper “The Relationship of Age to Immunological Reactions,” (7) and need not be repeated here.

[学科分类] 生物科学（综合）