Immunology is a branch of biology that covers the study of immune systems in all organisms. Immunology charts, measures, and contextualizes the physiological functioning of the immune system in states of both health and diseases; malfunctions of the immune system in immunological disorders (such. PreTest is the closest you can get to seeing the test before you take it. Great for course review and the USMLE Step 1!Microbiology: PreTest asks the right questions so you’ll know the right answers. Open it and start learning what's on the test. 500 USMLE-style questions and answers. IMMUNOLOGY — noun Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary Date: 1910 a science that deals with the immune system and the cell-mediated. Download Medical Microbiology And Immunology PDF Free The most concise, clearly written, and up-to-date review of medical microbiology and immunology Essential for USMLE review and medical microbio.

1. The roots of immunology

The discipline of immunology grew out of the observation that individuals who had recovered from certain infectious diseases were thereafter protected from the disease. The Latin terms immunis, meaning “exempt, released” and immunitas – liberation, freedom from something are the source of English word immunity, meaning the state of protection from infectious disease or invasive alien species (including pathogens), as well as foreign substances having antigenic properties.

Immunity is the way of organism protection against substances with foreign genetic material, with foreign or own, but changed, antigens. Immunology is the science of immunity. It deals with genetic, molecular and cellular mechanisms of organism reaction on foreign substances, or antigens.

Perhaps the earliest written reference to the phenomenon of immunity can be traced back to Thucydides (Фукидид), the great historian of the Peloponnesian War (Пелопоннесская война). In describing a plague (чума) in Athens, he wrote in 430 BC that only those who had recovered from the plague could nurse the sick because they would not contract the disease a second time. Although early societies recognized the phenomenon of immunity, almost two thousand years passed before the concept was successfully converted into medically effective practice.

The first recorded attempts to induce immunity deliberately (сознательно) were performed by the Chinese and Turks in the fifteenth century. Various reports suggest that the dried crusts (корки) derived from smallpox pustules were either inhaled into the nostrils or inserted into small cuts in the skin (a technique called variolation).

In 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador (посол) to Constantinople, observed the positive effects of variolation on the native population and had the technique performed on her own children.

The method was significantly improved by the English physician Edward Jenner, in 1798. Intrigued by the fact that milkmaids who had contracted the mild disease cowpox were subsequently immune to smallpox, which is a disfiguring and often fatal disease, Jenner reasoned that introducing fluid from a cowpox pustule into people (i.e., inoculating them) might protect them from smallpox. To test this idea, he inoculated an eight-year-old boy with fluid from a cowpox pustule and later intentionally infected the child with smallpox. As predicted, the child did not develop smallpox. Jenner’s technique of inoculating with cowpox to protect against smallpox spread quickly throughout Europe. However, for many reasons, including a lack of obvious disease targets and knowledge of their causes, it was nearly a hundred years before this technique was applied to other diseases.

As so often happens in science, serendipity (интуитивная прозорливость) in combination with astute (проницательный) observation led to the next major advance in immunology, the induction of immunity to cholera.Louis Pasteur had succeeded in growing the bacterium thought to cause fowl (птица) cholera (т.е. куриная холера) in culture and then had shown that chickens injected with the cultured bacterium developed cholera. After returning from a summer vacation, in 1881, he injected some chickens with an old culture. The chickens became ill, but, to Pasteur’s surprise, they recovered. Pasteur then grew a fresh culture of the bacterium with the intention (намерение) of injecting it into some fresh chickens. But, as the story goes, his supply of chickens was limited, and therefore he used the previously injected chickens. Again to his surprise, the chickens were completely protected from the disease. Pasteur hypothesized and proved that aging had weakened the virulence of the pathogen and that such an attenuated strain might be administered to protect against the disease. He called this attenuated strain a vaccine(from the Latin vacca, meaning “cow”), in honor of Jenner’s work with cowpox inoculation.

Pasteur extended these findings to other diseases, demonstrating that it was possible to attenuate,or weaken a pathogen and administer the attenuated strain as a vaccine. In a now classic experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort (в Пуйи-ле-Фор) in 1881, Pasteur first vaccinated one group of sheep with heat-attenuated anthrax (сибирская язва) bacillus (Bacillus anthracis); he then challenged the vaccinated sheep and some unvaccinated sheep with a virulent culture of the bacillus. All the vaccinated sheep lived, and all the unvaccinated animals died. These experiments marked the beginnings of the discipline of immunology. In 1885, Pasteur administered his first vaccine to a human, a young boy who had been bitten repeatedly by a rabid (бешеный) dog. The boy, Joseph Meister, was inoculated with a series of attenuated rabies virus preparations. He lived and later became a custodian (сторож) at the Pasteur Institute.

2. Early studies revealed (showed, demonstrated)humoral and cellular components of the immune system

Although Pasteur proved that vaccination worked, he did not understand how. The experimental work of Emil von Behring (Эмиль фон Беринг) and Shibasaburo Kitasato(Сибасабуро Китасато) in 1890 gave the first insights (ideas) into the mechanism of immunity, earning von Behring the Nobel prize in medicine in 1901 (Table 1-1). Von Behring and Kitasato demonstrated that serum(the liquid, noncellular component of coagulated blood) from animals previously immunized to diphtheria could transfer the immune state to unimmunized animals. In search of the protective agent, various researchers during the next decade demonstrated that an active component from immune serum could neutralize toxins, precipitate toxins, and agglutinate (clump – глыба) bacteria. In each case, the active agent was named for the activity it exhibited: antitoxin, precipitin, and agglutinin, respectively.

Год присуждения премии	Лауреат	За что присуждена премия
Эмиль Адольф фон Беринг	За открытие антитоксинов (антител), их применение при лечении дифтерии.
Роберт Кох	За исследование туберкулеза.
Илья Ильич Мечников и Пауль Эрлих	За труды по иммунитету, открытие фагоцитоза (Мечников) и гуморальную теорию иммунитета (Эрлих).
Шарль Рише	В знак признания его работ по анафилаксии.
Жюль Борде	За экспериментальные работы по комплементзависимому бактериолизу, специфическому гемолизу, за разработку метода фиксации комплемента для диагностики инфекционных болезней.
Карл Ландштейнер	За открытие групп крови человека.
Макс Тейлер	За создание вакцины против желтой лихорадки.
Даниеле Бове	За открытие роли гистамина в патогенезе аллергических реакций и разработку антигистаминных фармакологических препаратов для лечения аллергических болезней.
Макфарлейн Бёрнет иПитер Брайан Медавар	За открытие искусственной иммунной толерантности (переносимости).
Джералд Эдельман и Родни Портер	За открытия, касающиеся химической структуры антител.
Розалин Сасмен Ялоу	За развитие радиоиммунологических методов определения пептидных гормонов.
Б

Pretest Immunology