Eye catching science

It’s all very well having revolutionary ideas but it seems that today, if you can join that growing club of ‘visible scientists’ then your chances of making an impact are much higher. Bernard Dixon, reporting in the July issue of Current Biology(1997;7:R3), recalls Ray Goodall’s definition of ‘visible scientists’ as bench scientists who discoursed frequently and opinionatedly about the importance and impact of science on society. Names which readily come to mind are David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Steve Jones. A new name has been enlisted, that of one time bunny girl, Polly Matzinger. Her claim to fame derives from her promulgation of a ‘danger theory’ which challenges the long held view on immunological defence systems based on the Medawar–McFarlane Burnet self/non-self theory. According to Matzinger, the body does not differentiate signals on the basis of whether they are foreign or not but on the basis of whether they represent danger or not. Thus, many foreign antigens are actually not recognised as dangerous and a symbiotic relation between host and invader can develop. The corollary is of course that some self antigens can, under certain circumstances, also be recognised as ‘dangerous’ and the body mounts the same sort of immune response to them as to dangerous invading antigens, thus leading to autoimmune disease. This contrasts …