Abstract
Few areas in modern medicine remain so beclouded in mystery as the so-called allergic diseases. A substantial proportion of the human race each year suffers to a varying degree from asthma, hay fever, food allergies, drug allergies, contact dermatitis, and other unpleasant kinds of allergic manifestations. While there are few who would deny that hypersensitivity reactions, whether of the immediate or of the delayed inflammatory type, are triggered by a reaction in vivo between antigen and some form of antibody, we understand very little of how cellular damage is caused. It has been firmly established, in the case of the hay-fever type of allergy, that serum antibody is involved, and there is an increasing body of evidence which suggests that the type of antibody concerned (atopic reagin) possesses chemical as well as biological properties which distinguish it from the usual type of precipitating antibody studied by the immunologist in the laboratory.
Footnotes
Presidential address delivered before the American Association of Immunologists, San Francisco, California, April 12, 1955.
In this address I have not attempted a comprehensive survey of the enormous literature on hypersensitivity, and for this reason reference to many important papers has been omitted.
This investigation was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, United States Public Health Service.
