Marita Troye-Blomberg, a malaria immunologist at the Wenner-Gren Institute of the University of Stockholm, has two words of advice for PhD students and postdocs discouraged about finding permanent posts as immunologists: "Hang on." The coming decade will see a wave of retirements by senior academics in basic and clinical immunology in Europe.
"Hang on", Marita Troye-Blomberg (right), of Stockholm University, advises discouraged immunologists seeking career advancement.
"So many of us born around the 1940s are due to retire, and many of those born around the 1950s have already left science or moved abroad because we were occupying the top positions," Troye-Blomberg says. "Replacements will be needed, but it will be competitive."
They are, after all, working in perhaps the most mature and well-understood field of biology, says Fritz Melchers, director for 20 years of the Basel Institute of Immunology (which closed last year), but one where there are still some very basic questions to answer and much applied research to do. That should make for anintriguing mix for career immunologists — the challenge of learning the huge body of existing work while prying loose answers in unknown territory (see "Professorial tips").
INNATE QUESTIONS
"How does tolerance develop, how do regulator cells work, how do lymphocytes move in the body, what is innate immunity?" asks Martin Röllinghof, from the Institute for Microbiology and Immunology in Erlangen, Germany. Such questions are of long standing within immunology, and because answers do not always have obvious applications it can sometimes be difficult to get funding, says Troye-Blomberg. But the answers will eventually serve a wide range of medical need. Immunology encompasses and underpins a breathtaking array of medical topics — allergic reactions, autoimmunity, rheumatology, vaccinology, oncology, transplantation, infectious diseases and immune deficiencies.
"There is much more of an interface between basic research and clinical immunology in a number of fields than in any other therapeutic area," says Jean-François Bach, an immunologist at Necker Hospital, Paris.
So how will immunologists solve their basic questions as well as bridging the gap between basic and clinical research? The tools of molecular biology — proteomics, bioinformatics, transgenic mice and the like — will, of course, help, and should be pressed into service, says Bach. But he cautions against placing them centre stage. Repeatedly, he and other immunologists say that it is time now to think of immunology in terms of the whole system, not its parts.
Having spent 10 to 20 years deconstructing the immune system all the way to DNA and RNA, the time has come to reconstruct it, says Geneviève Milon from the Institut Pasteur in Paris and chair of the education committee of the International Union of Immunological Societies.
MOVING IN VIVO
The only way to explore fully the mysteries of the immune system as well as understanding its interactions with microorganisms is to study immunology in vivo, says Marie-Christine Béné, an immunologist at Nancy University, France.
Others around Europe echo the view. "Laboratory models of infection have some value but sometimes study the immune systems of inappropriate hosts. You need to go into the field, collect samples from people, survey the village and assess the parasite burden in parallel with work in models," says David Pritchard, professor of parasite immunology at Nottingham University. Such a holistic approach is the only way to learn something of the parasite's interaction with its host in the real world.
Indeed, field work combined with sequence data, bioinformatics and the panoply of molecular biology's tools are a powerful combination. Immunology therefore presents an opportunity for the synthesis of many new and old biological techniques and has the ambitious aim of explaining a physiological system that pervades the body and, when not functioning normally or when under attack, underpins many diseases.
SUPPORTING STRUCTURE
Immunologist Martin Röllinghof wrestles with some of the long-standing and fundamental questions in immunology.
So how well does the scientific infrastructure across Europe support the challenge? On the whole, quite well, although closure by Roche of the Basel Institute for Immunology was a severe blow to the community. For 30 years, the institute was an intellectual powerhouse of thinking about the basic questions of immunology and it was closed just as the need to think once again holistically was being acknowledged.
And there are some scattered clouds on the horizon, one being the availability of professors of immunology. France, for example, is well stocked with clinical immunologists, but not professors of basic immunology (see "Clinical immunology paths"). "This is a bizarre development," says Béné, and one that Röllinghof says he could see developing also in Germany.
It is doubtful, though, that these clouds will build into a storm front, and they could force some interesting international mixing, because, on the plus side, there will soon be room at the top, a practical consideration for any career.
There is, of course, the usual problem that academics are paid less than people in industry or finance, but when asked if she had anything to say to aspiring immunologists, Béné said simply, "Tell them it's great."
Web links
The European Federation of Immunological Societies (links to all national societies in Europe) 
http://www.efis.org
International Union of Immunological Societies http://www.qimr.edu.au/iuis
Institut Curie http://www.curie.fr
Institut Pasteur http://www.pasteur.fr
The British Society for Immunology (including job vacancies) http://immunology.org
