Word: bone
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Presented by Good and his group in the mid-'60s, the "two component" theory became the foundation of modern immunology, and led to new experiments and ways to understand the phenomenon of immune response. It also led to another of Good's contributions ?the first successful use of bone-marrow transplants to correct immunodeficiency disease...
...Doctors had experimented with bone-marrow transplants in the mid-'50s, primarily to combat leukemia. But their efforts proved generally unsuccessful. Immunologically sound bone marrow contained cells that recognized the recipient of this gift as "foreign." The new cells, in a phenomenon known as "graft v. host" reaction, thus rejected the host, producing lymphocytes capable of reacting with and destroying his tissue. In fact, the reaction, combined with infection and other factors, could prove fatal to the recipient whose immune system was either weak or absent...
Legacy. Good tried a different approach with five-month-old David Camp, who was suffering from hereditary immunodeficiency disease, which had already killed twelve infants on the maternal side of his family. Thinking back to work that he himself had done in 1956, Good remembered that mice given bone marrow from donors whose cells were genetically similar suffered from graft-v.-host reaction but never died from it. He reasoned that David, too, would survive if a good tissue match could be found...
Luckily, the infant had four sisters; one of them had cells similar to his. Using a local anesthetic, Good's team inserted a needle into the bone of the sister's leg and withdrew about a billion marrow cells. Then, they injected the cells into David's peritoneal cavity, relying on the cells' natural homing instincts to guide them to the bone marrow. The graft took. Graft-v.-host reaction set in, peaked and finally passed. The new cells overcame David's lethal legacy by giving him the immune system he lacked; the child, now five, is immunologically normal...
...nature to quickly recognize, attack and destroy any foreign matter that enters the body. The system is complex and depends for its function on a wide variety of highly specialized substances. Its main agents are cells called lymphocytes, which are produced by the so-called "stem cells" of the bone marrow, the mushy, reddish substance that manufactures blood components. Once formed, the lymphocytes develop into two distinct types of cells, each of which plays an important role in the immune response. Those that pass through the thymus-a small organ located just under the breastbone in children (it shrinks...