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IMMUNOGHEMISTRY 



MICHAEL HEIDELBERGER, professor of biochemistry, college 



OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; CHEMIST TO THE 

 PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL, NEW YORK 



rHIS WAS the title, perhaps whimsically given, of a series 

 of lectures delivered in 1904 by Svante Arrhenius, a great 

 Swedish physical chemist, at the University of California, and pub- 

 lished in book form (la) three years later — so hectic was the pace in 

 immunology. True, Ehrlich (5) had insisted on the chemical nature 

 of immune processes and immune reactions, but his views were over- 

 shadowed by the widely accepted and facile concepts of Bordet (2a), 

 whose colossal contributions to immunology gave him vast influence. 

 He first classified immune reactions as essentially physical, then, when 

 this position became untenable, maintained that immune reactions 

 were "colloidal." The persuasive, amorphous terminology of the 

 early colloid chemistry, descriptive of everything but accounting for 

 little, found its way into books and papers on bacteriology and im- 

 munology, where, be it sadly whispered, it may often still be seen. 

 Doubtless, many of those who once found it useful and comfortable 

 still think of it with nostalgia. 



But Arrhenius, with his Danish pupil, Madsen, proceeded to 

 show how, with certain assumptions, the laws of classical chemistry 

 could be applied to typical immune reactions, and so the term immiino- 

 chemistry came into serious use and was seriously taken, even though 

 the proposed analogy of antigen-antibody reactions to the union of 

 weak acids and weak bases was quickly shown to be im-alid. 



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