T and B lymphocytes: Recognition and function

The most prescient statement in this book comes in Rolf Zinkernagel’s review of the restriction of cytotoxic T-cell reaction by major histocompatibility-gene complexes: “to unravel the reciprocal regulation of restriction specificity and receptor repertoire for foreign antigens, ultimately it will be necessary to understand the genetic organization and molecular nature of the gene and/or gene products that are involved.” The book records the proceedings of the 1979 ICN-UCLA symposium held in Colorado, March 1979. This is definitely not a book for the immunological tyro or for any reader who is not already conversant in the cryptic terminology adopted by immunological cogniscenti. It is the nearest approach to savouring the atmosphere and discussions of an important immunological meeting that immunologists can achieve short of being an invited participant. The papers are terse and concentrated, presenting an immense amount of data within a very few pages and dealing with highly sophisticated and elaborate techniques. Most familiar immunological problems are aired including the mechanisms by which T cells recognise altered antigens, the genetic restriction of these interactions, and the series of controls that regulate the intensity and persistence of these responses. It is now soberly appreciated that immune reactions involve an elaborate series of lymphocyte interactions and a wide variety of populations, each characterised by a constellation of specific anatomical, biophysical and functional characteristics. There are no simple unitarian theories for answering the persistent questions concerning immune recognition, tolerance and the aberrations that lead to auto-immune disease. The increased sophistication of experimental manoeuvres has done more to delineate the scale of the problem than to provide any definitive answers. This reality underscores the importance of Zinkernagel’s comment and it will be apparent from reading the contributions to this symposium that biochemical analysis is the best hope of unravelling immunological phenomena. There are several contributions dealing with the structure of lymphocyte membrane and its chemical composition. Just as understanding the basis of antibody specificity depended upon an appreciation of immunoglobulin structure and composition, so the problems of T-cell function are being solved by characterising the membrane proteins in T lymphocytes as a first step to appreciating what endows these structures with antigen-binding specificity. Other sections of the book deal more conventionally with antibody diversity, the facts that determine whether antigen triggers or tolerises responding lymphocytes, and the steps in T-cell maturation. The essential discovery in the physiology of T-cell maturation was the realisation that these cells learn to recognise foreign antigens and self antigens in association. Even this initially biological discovery is now analysed in precise immunochemical terms. Whilst it is clearly impossible to single out individual communications from so vast an assembly of reports in this context, the experiments of Jonathan Uhr and his colleagues are especially striking; they have analysed target cells experimentally infected with vesicular stomatitis virus to dissect the changes that render these susceptible to lysis by cytotoxic T-lymphocytes. This book therefore has many features to recommend it. There is no point in publishing the proceedings of a symposium unless they appear soon after the event; in this instance the gap was only about 6 months. Because conference proceedings are even more ephemeral than formal scientific papers, the proceedings must be reasonably priced; given that the authors’ typescripts have been processed directly in the interests of rapid production, this book is well produced and, in contrast to most contemporary immunological texts, very reasonably priced. To be of any value, conference proceedings must present fresh information and interpretations and not simply rehash published work; remarkably, most of the information in this text is hitherto