JOURNAL CLUB: Adaptive immune features of natural killer cells
Martin Fenner
Tuesday, 03 February 2009 22:03 UTC
I would like to recommend the following paper:
Sun JC, Beilke JN, Lanier LL. Adaptive immune features of natural killer cells. Nature 2009;457:557-61 doi:10.1038/nature07665
The paper not only describes a very important observation that challenges the basic concept of innate vs. adaptive immune responses, but does so in a very clear and easy to understand language. There are many wonderful things to say about this paper. The title summarizes the paper perfectly. And the paper avoids the problem of many immunology papers that use far too many abbreviations.
-
Replies
-
Thanks Martin! Looks really interesting. I remember one immunology book I cam across put natural killer cells as components of both the innate and the adaptive immune system – looks like they were right.
I do find the terminology of immunology confusing – so easy to get natural killer cells and killer T cells confused, for instance. I also dislike the term ‘antigen’ – it is too much like ‘antibody’- and very confusing for a lay(wo)man like me!
-
Martin, I agree that the paper is pretty easy to understand. I’m struck, however, by the use of words such as “natural killer cells”. They sound scary and dangerous. Moreover, these cells have “self-renewing ‘memory’” (a very human concept) that is transferred into “naive” animals that respond with a “viral challenge”. (What is the opposite of “naive” I wonder, and would ‘response’ be more precise and less human-like than “challenge”?)
While such terminology may make a story more exciting it could also have unintended consequences. When cells are given negative human characteristics, we want to eradicate them. In this case perhaps that’s a good thing but in another context – such as ecology- it can lead to disastrous consequences such as the needless eradication of a foreign species.(See Natural Enemies – Metaphor or Misconception? by Chew and Laubichler in Science Vol 301, 4 July 2003.)
Linda
-
I believe that more than many other disciplines, immunologists have developed their own language that is often difficult to understand for the outsider. This is true both for an unlimited number of abbreviations, and for words that have a special meaning, but are taken from our daily vocabulary. Memory and killing of the enemy are two fundamental concepts in immunology and indeed sound scary.
One often-used immunology term that regularly confuses me in a conversation is Tregs (regulatory T cells), it sounds very much like T. Rex to me (which in turn could mean both a dinosaur and a 1970s pop band).
Natural killer cells were discovered in the early 1970s. Maybe that language is also a product of the time – U.S. president Nixon declared War on Cancer in 1971. It would be interesting to study the historic context of the language used for scientific discoveries. In medicine, a disease used to be named after the person (or persons) first describing it, but that practice has long been abandoned. And we used to have a lot of Latin names, a practice also abandoned. The liver disease Icterus intermittens juvenilis is for example called Gilbert’s disease (after Augustin Nicolas Gilbert) iin the U.S. and Morbus Meulengracht (after Einar Meulengracht) in Germany. Just imagine that AIDS would have been called Gallo’s disease (in the U.S.) and Morbus Montagnier-Barré-Sinoussi (in France).
-
Anonymous
I don’t see this article as saying anything that is new. As an undergrad (4 years ago) at my first summer internship I worked in an Immunology lab where they worked with NK cells and their receptors. I remember learning then about their duality. Abbreviations do tend to be over used in any writing about the immune system.
-
