Immunity

Our goal in writing Immunity was to reflect the advances in understanding that have made it possible to present immunology as a description of the response of the immune system to infectious agents. Since responding to infection is clearly what the immune system is for, it may seem surprising that there could be any other way of presenting it. But the study of immunology was for a long time based largely on the use of artificial antigens, and focused on the interactions of lymphocytes analyzed by various measures in vitro. These were classic studies on which the present understanding has been built; but it is only much more recently, with the explosive growth in the recognition of the role of innate immune cells and molecules, along with the availability of genetically manipulated mice, improved methods of imaging in vivo, and the study of the immune evasion mechanisms of pathogens, that it has become possible to place the elements of the immune system in context and begin to describe the biological basis of immunity.

Thus when we began writing this book, there was no immunology text whose chapters followed the sequence of an immune response, starting with the innate cells and molecules that stand pre-armed by selection during evolution to recognize and attack invaders without delay, and progressing from there to the activation of lymphocytes, which depends upon these early responses and provides lasting immunity to specific infectious organisms. With the inclusion in the author team of a specialist in infectious disease, we were able to add to the chapters describing the fundamental basis of immunity three chapters describing immune responses to some important bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections and thus integrating the basic immunology presented earlier, and allowing the student to grasp how the immune system works in the whole organism.

Anthony DeFranco, Richard Locksley and Miranda Robertson
April 2007

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