This article was published in Cancer Immunity, a Cancer Research Institute journal that ceased publication in 2013 and is now provided online in association with Cancer Immunology Research.
One of the great surprises of my first stay in the US during the fall of 1950 concerned the so-called "transplantable tumors" and their "immunology". During the first part of the 20th century, cancer researchers spoke about transplantable and non-transplantable tumors. The mice and rats were not inbred and transplantability therefore meant transgression of histocompatibility barriers, but most researchers were unaware of this. It was relatively easy to immunize against transplantable tumors and "tumor immunology" was an "optimistic" field due to this artifact. Theodore Hauschka, my first American mentor, told me about inbred mice and the laws of transplantation. Virtually all tumors were transplantable within their inbred strain of origin, but only some exceptional tumors were "transplantable" to foreign strains. The easy immunization and rejection experiments did not work when tumors were grown and tested in their own inbred strain of origin.
All of us who learned this lesson and worked with inbred mice - still a minority around 1955 or thereabouts - became convinced that tumor immunology did not exist. The immune system regarded tumor cells as "self" in the primary host and there was nothing more to it.
In spite of this clear, definite evidence that was available already in the early 50s, the artifactual, allograft-based "tumor immunology" continued to flourish during at least one more decade. Thousands of meaningless experiments were performed and hundreds of papers were published.
The "Tumor Immunology" session of the International Cancer Congress in London in 1958 was chaired by Peter Gorer. Together with George Snell, Peter pioneered the study of the H-2 system (the name was coined by him) and he would …
Volume 1, Issue 1
