How Antibody Is Made

When a person is vaccinated with a suspension of killed or weakened virus particles, his system is stimulated to produce antibodies against that particular virus. If he should later be infected with the same kind of virus in the wild, full-strength form, his system "remembers" the vaccination, quickly pours out a flood of antibody to halt the invader in its tracks. At any rate, that is how most vaccinations have long been supposed to work. But are things really that neat and simple?

No, say many immunologists, and last week Manhattan's Dr. Jonathan W. Uhr, 37, won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for advancing man's knowledge of how little he still knows about how virus infections, vaccinations and other antigen-antibody reactions really work.

Without Delay. New York-born Dr. Uhr (pronounced "oor") had been planning to specialize in internal medicine rather than immunology until, after graduation from medical school and between residencies, he found he had six months to kill. He spent them studying microbiology at New York University. ''Within a few weeks I became involved in the excitement of that work," he says.

His excitement led Dr. Uhr to inject various amounts of virus into guinea pigs. He chose a small virus, of a type that does not usually cause disease in animals, but one which has the advantage of setting off antibody reactions that can be readily measured. And one of his first discoveries was that it is not true that it takes several days for a virus to get off the production of antibody. If a latent period exists, Dr. Uhr found, it is shorter than 24 hours. Nor did it turn out to be true that one type of virus triggers the production of only one kind of antibody. His work confirmed that guinea pigs have at least two kinds, and higher animals have three. They differ not only in size but in the schedules on which they are produced. The heavier antibody particles are formed first, then their production tapers off. The lighter particles do not show up until a few days later, and they are produced in much greater quantity.

The Body's Mistake. One of Dr. Uhr's most important findings was that "immunological memory" usually involves the smaller molecules. The system can remember all through its life how to make them, and how to muster them to repel an invading virus. But why, having once started, does it not keep on manufacturing them rather than wait for a new invasion? Neither Dr. Uhr nor any other immunologist can be certain, but there seems to be a feedback mechanism whereby, once the blood is sated with antibody, it yells "Enough!," and the antibody factory shuts down.

Though Dr. Uhr has worked with some viruses that infect man, most of his experiments have been with the tiny FX174, which normally attacks only bacteria. It may seem a long leap to any useful application in human medicine, but Immunologist Uhr, who is now director of the Irvington House Institute for Rheumatic Fever and Allied Diseases, has already shown that newborn babies react to FX in much the same way as guinea pigs. And children's reactions to antigens are immensely important in rheumatic fever, which seems to result from the body's mistaking part of its own heart muscle for an invading bacterial antigen.

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