Innate Immunity: An Overview

April 27, 2023 Jeremiah Hendren

Innate Immunity: An Overview

Beutler, Bruce. Molecular Immunology 40, no. 12 (2004): 845-859.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molimm.2003.10.005

As to the afferent arm, the modern field of innate immunity, with its intense concern over how microbes are sensed, is very much linked to the older field microbial pathogenesis. When Pasteur and Koch independently propounded the germ theory of disease, they declared that microbes caused all infections. The implicit corollary to this decree was the fact that however complex the observable events in an infection might be, they must ultimately be traceable to specific molecular components of microbes. It did not take long for investigators to focus their attention on the microbial “poisons” that gave infections their nefarious character. In the fullness of time, it became clear that the innate immune system itself is what makes microbes poisonous, for in its attempt to combat infection, the host may harm its own tissues and undermine its own survival.

Bruce Beutler

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