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South Africa is in the throes of an AIDS epidemic compounded by tuberculosis. Nevertheless, responses to the recent launch of a colorful book promoting adolescent knowledge of HIV immunopathogenesis provide grounds for cautious optimism that education can induce a form of “social vaccination” in South Africa and elsewhere.
This Focus issue brings together the cornucopia of strategies that pathogens and tumors utilize to avoid immune recognition. Here Rodney Phillips discusses some general principles that emerge from this analysis.
Signaling through antigen receptors was in the limelight from 4–8 May 2002 at the third EMBO workshop on “Lymphocyte antigen receptor and coreceptor signaling”. Key findings, new questions and emerging trends from the workshop are summarized here.
Although tetramer technology has been wildly successful for examination of MHC class I–recognizing T cells, the same hasn't been true for MHC class II reagents. A recent workshop at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was convened to address this.
Historical insight: The clonal selection theory of antibody formation has recently been subjected to challenge from many quarters. A review of its history and that of scientific theories in general points to the importance of distinguishing between the central hypotheses of a theory and its subsidiary implications.