Dana Foundation Blog

Immunocalifragilisticexpialidocious

The day after he accepted the AAI-Dana Foundation Award in Human Immunology Research, I sat down with the affable Jim Allison so that he could explain to me what his research was about and what it means for cancer patients and their loved ones.

The subsequent article, published on this Web site (and to be included in July’s print edition of Immunology in the News), examines a small sliver of the current research scene that goes by the name “immunotherapy.”

I knew the term and was familiar with the basic underlying science, but I had heard “immunotherapy” used only rarely, and never before I became an editor here (where immunology, along with brain science and arts education, is part of our daily three-course meal).

I wondered if the word wasn’t a fairly recent portmanteau, perhaps introduced to describe succinctly to a lay audience what is in fact a complex domain of modern medicine (or maybe to jazz up dull med school lectures). I asked him how long the term had been around.

Allison, with the patience of a man who doubtlessly has long-suffered such public ignorance, responded: “Oh, 80 or 100 years.”

Red-faced, I later slinked back to my books for an ultimately fruitless investigation into the word’s etymology. In the process, however, I learned about the William B. Coley, a popular candidate for the title “Father of Cancer Immunotherapy.”

Coley worked at the New York Cancer Hospital (now part of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where Allison is a researcher), where as a young surgeon in 1890 he treated a childhood friend of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in a tragic case that meant a great deal for the future of cancer research.

I found the story in the first chapter of “A Commotion in the Blood,” available for free here. It is impossible not to be moved by the tale of a young, adventurous woman, killed in her prime by an excruciating disease for which 19^th century doctors had virtually no treatment.

That her death so devastated and inspired both one of our country’s great philanthropists and one of its pioneering cancer researchers makes this a medical drama that bests any “House, M.D.” or “Gray’s Anatomy” I’ve seen.

Coley devoted his life to studying biological vaccines for cancer, and his medical lineage can today be traced ahead to researchers such as Allison.

“Immunotherapy” may sound inscrutable, but behind the medical jargon is a history of loves lost and saved, doctors’ mad passions, medical miracles, deaths, and violent battles fought by microscope.

In truth, the reason one hears the term only rarely in public discussions of medicine is that, as Allison asserted in his lecture, the field has long been “thought of by too many as some sort of alternative medicine.”

Hopefully Allison and his fellow warriors change all that.

—Ben Mauk

Educating the educators (with immunology lab time)

This week I report from the Experimental Biology 2008 convention in San Diego, where, from April 5-9, 13,000 members of several organizations, including the American Association of Immunologists, converge to discuss the year's advancements and next year's challenges. It's all a little overwhelming, but I hope to check in with as many findings and tidbits as possible.

A Sunday morning workshop at the EB/AAI convention brought together middle and high school science teachers, immunology-focused researchers and outreach activists to discuss one of AAI's more successful programs in bringing immunology to the classroom.

Many of those present had recently participated in the John H. Wallace High School Teachers Program, in which science teachers work with “mentor” scientists at immunology laboratories. Over the course of four to six weeks the teachers participate in research and devise lab exercises to take back to the classroom.

The program hopes to engage teachers who may not have had much experience in a research lab setting, thus giving them, as program director Brain A. Cobb quoted one satisfied educator, “street cred with ... students for having worked in the lab.”

As someone who remembers far too many 80-minute PowerPoint slide shows in high school science classes, I appreciate any program with the overarching goal of, as Cobb said, “enhancing science education [in] the middle and high school classroom,” as well as assisting “in narrowing the performance gap between majority and minority students.”

Since 1985, 145 teachers have participated in the program, including 75 teachers from 22 states since 1996. (AAI began sponsoring the program in 1993.)

After a summer internship investigating the role of cytokine levels in the autoimmune disease lupus at the University of Rochester, teacher Laurie Asermily returned to her school, the rural Mynderse Academy in Seneca Falls, N.Y., with fresh ideas.

“Kids see crime shows, and [with that background] are much more interested in investigating what's wrong than looking at [an immune system] where everything is working,” she said. The experiment she designed for her students dealt with looking at images of B cells, studying cytokine levels and “diagnosing” a patient as having either lupus or a healthy immune system.

“Autoimmune diseases affect mostly females,” Asermily said, “and my students were very interested in that. They've started to form their own hypothoses.” The children prepared posters and gave presentations on autoimmune diseases, including one student who spoke at length about his own juvenile diabetes.

Participating teachers worked with a curriculum expert to devise both the lab project and the activities surrounding it. For instance, Asermily demonstrated a computer-based, autoimmune-themed Jeopardy game. “Don't try to make one of these from scratch,” she said.

A major task of the Dana Foundation is educating the general public about immunology-related health guidelines and advancements in research. We strive to accomplish this through our free periodical Immunology in the News and our free Dana Sourcebook of Immunology, a textbook for secondary and post-secondary students and teachers. Hopefully, teachers are taking advantage of these resources in planning activities that get kids engaged. It helps, of course, to have an engaged, lab-experienced teacher.

—Ben Mauk