Theories Supported By Clonal Selection
Burnet and Peter Medawar worked together on understanding immunological tolerance, a phenomenon also explained by clonal selection. This is the organism’s ability to tolerate the introduction of cells without an immune response as long as this occurs early in the organism’s development. There are a vast number of lymphocytes occurring in the immune system ranging from cells which are tolerant of self tissue to cells which are not tolerant of self tissue. However, only cells that are tolerant to self tissue will survive the embryonic stage. If non-self tissue is introduced, the lymphocytes which develop will be the ones which included the non-self tissues as self tissue.
In 1959 Burnet proposed that under certain circumstances, tissues could be successfully transplanted into foreign recipients. This work has led to a much greater understanding of the immune system and also great advances in tissues transplantation. Burnet and Medawar shared the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1960.
In 1974 Niels Kai Jerne proposed that the immune system functions as a network, that is regulated via interactions between the variable parts of lymphocytes and their secreted molecules. Immune network theory is firmly based on the concept of clonal selection. Jerne won the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology in 1984, largely for his contributions to immune network theory.
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