Dr. Miller makes two charges in connection with my suggestion that by 1926 Murphy had identified the lymphocyte as the active factor in graft rejection and in other immunological responses. First, he feels that I have inadmissibly interpreted Murphy's work in the context of modern knowledge of the lymphocyte, rather than in the context of the times, and second, that Murphy's terminology involved neither “a defined cell type” nor the implication of an “immune” response.
I attempted to make clear that, in the community of experimental transplantation oncologists, it was known from the work of Schöne (who coined the term “tumor immunity” in 19121) and of Tyzzer (who wrote an extensive review entitled “Tumor immunity” in 19162) that both tumor and normal tissue grafts are rejected by an active immune response. As a member of this small group of researchers, Murphy would have taken this for granted; I submit that it runs as a leitmotif through all of his work in this area. The problem for Miller is that Murphy prefers the term “resistance” when speaking of graft rejection or of protection from infection. This was a fairly common substitute among experimental pathologists of the time; even Hans Zinsser, in 1914, published a book entitled Infection and Resistance3 while reviewing contemporary immunological knowledge, and that doyen of immunopathological research on tuberculosis, Arnold Rich, often spoke of resistance when he meant immunity4. I return to the point that, whereas the tumor people undoubtedly knew of Murphy's work, the mainstream immunologists of the time (Heidelberger, Landsteiner and Marrack) were uninterested in transplantation and in the mechanisms of defense against infection. Thus, the work of Murphy and other pioneers remained substantially unknown to those looking in other directions.
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