Immunology today offers a sharp focal point for a number of general questions
that confront biologists, biochemists, physiologists, and many others
who are concerned with cellular interactions. In immunology, cellular immunology
in particular, the immune system is the central concept. Although
much progress has been made in documenting the constituents and many of
the phenomena exhibited by the immune system, there is an urgent need to
understand how the constituents interact to produce the phenomena. Though
potentially misleading, a useful analogy is to view immunology as being similar
to the lactose system, or phage system, of Escherichia coli in the preOperon
days: We are looking for that conceptual framework which will solve
the apparent conflicts and subsume the mass of amorphous data into a unified
system in the same way that the Operon theory did. Much the same as
E. coli has become the prototype organism for molecular biology, so the
mouse is becoming the prototype organism for immunology.