OPENING REMARKS ON PROBLEMS OF IMMUNIZATION IN 

 STRESSED ANIMALS 



Dan H. Campbell 



Department of Chemistry 



California Institute of Technology 



Pasadena, California 



First I will orient you with our own interest which began about 

 when Dr. Larry Irving was settir^ up a laboratory at Pt. Barrow. 

 We agreed that something should be done on immunological re- 

 search and biochemical problems. From this first investigation it 

 became obvious that many problems were apparent and should be 

 investigated. 



One of the first things that interested me was the arctic ground 

 squirrel whose body temperature goes down to near freezing when 

 it hibernates in the winter. If it gets a little colder, the animal 

 wakes up and shivers and then goes back to sleep. This is a rather 

 fantastic situation, but it might be representative of the extremes 

 between hypothermic and normal conditions. When the squirrel is 

 active, he makes up for the time he sleeps in various ways, so that 

 his metabolism is probably a little abnormal both in the summer 

 and in the winter. We first began to study the blood patterns in 

 normal and immunized animals to see if they would produce anti- 

 bodies. The idea then was to go through the gamut of tests. Most 

 of these have not yet been completed. 



We studied antibody formation, and to some extent, persistence 

 or fate of antigens and antibodies. Most of this work has never been 

 published. One of the first interesting problems which impressed 

 me was that in the winter time, the squirrel's blood didn't clot. 

 At first this was a nuisance, because we wanted the blood to clot 

 for serum studies. This was significant in that as the body tempera- 

 ture decreased, the clotting time increased, and in the hibernating 

 animal, there was practically no clot formation. Back at the 



