The 50th Anniversary of the Discovery of Immunologic Tolerance

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

On October 3, 1953 — almost exactly half a century ago — Rupert E. Billingham, Peter B. Medawar, and I published a paper in Nature titled “‘Actively Acquired Tolerance' of Foreign Cells.”1 Medawar was the senior author, Billingham was his research fellow, and I was Medawar's postgraduate student. I was about to begin the third and final year of my Ph.D. studies. Immunologic tolerance formed an important, but not the only, part of my thesis. The eight-page preliminary paper in Nature firmly established the basis of immunologic tolerance and, in part, its mechanism. Seven years later, it led to the . . .