

Pref 



ace 



CULTIVATION of the Special fields of science at first tends to express 

 the attributes of the particular subjects of investigation, the 

 immediate practical objectives and the technical instrumentalities 

 which prove serviceable in each field. Specialization of investiga- 

 tional method and equipment, of vocabulary and of the body of 

 accumulating fact and conclusion may become extreme, resulting in 

 an unfortunate degree of isolation of the field and its workers. With 

 growing insight, however, the special lore of the particular field is 

 gradually seen to represent special aspects of the same truths which 

 may be perceived also from other fields, to exemplify laws of more 

 general validity. Isolationism in science is then a phase of narrow 

 understanding and immaturity. Integration enriches the special fields 

 in technique and content, and broadens the horizons of the workers. 

 The studies of Pasteur on the alcoholic, and tartaric, butyric and 

 acetic acid fermentations brought about by particular micro-organisms 

 were certainly among the principal original sources of scientific insight 

 into the specific causation of infectious diseases. Interrelationships 

 between the phenomena of immunity and of biocatalysis, also, have 

 been perceived by men of discernment working in both fields, Ehr- 

 lich, Morgenroth, Zinsser, Landsteiner, Avery, Marrack, Todd and 

 Northrop, to mention but a few. Ehrlich, indeed, borrowed his 

 famous lock and key simile expressing the specificity of antibody with 

 respect to antigen from Emil Fischer's studies on enzyme specificity. 

 As a matter of practice, however, physiological chemists working with 

 enzymes have only rarely concerned themselves with infectious disease 

 and immunity, and bacteriologists and immunologists have paid too 

 little heed to the many developments in enzymology paralleling devel- 

 opments in their own fields. The fullness of the integration possible 

 between the fields of enzyme chemistry, immuno-chemistry and the 

 mechanisms of infectious disease, has, indeed, in the writer's belief, 



