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It applied to class I antigen.  There was no evidence that it would also be somehow functioning with the class II antigens but the obvious possibility was there that somehow the class II antigens also are, in fact, participants in some form of dual recognition against the different kind of antigens. The response against the viruses was via the cytotoxicity and they were killing the lymphocytes or the active cells were killing the target cells infected by the virus. In the case of the class II associated... or the IR1 associated immune responses, the response was antibody response, which is of a different kind.  And this concept of two kinds of responses has in the meantime emerged in the... in immunology, so there was one going through... one response going through killing of target cells by cells, by activated immune cells, and the other going through the humeral response, that is the antibodies in a serum primarily, with the help of complement and the help of many other factors. So because of this dichotomy of the immune response, one could argue the response against the viruses... viral antigens, is channelled through the class I antigens serving as dual element... second element in the dual recognition of the immune response, and that somehow, it was still not clear how, but somehow the humoral arm of immunity, the response mediated through antibodies was generated by recognition of some other type of antigens than the viral antigens in association with the class II antigens... the class II molecules on the cells, and that was what I favoured... this interpretation.

Born in 1936, Jan Klein is a Czech-American immunologist who co-founded the modern science of immunogenetics – key to understanding illness and disease. He is the author or co-author of over 560 scientific publications and of seven books including 'Where Do We Come From?' which examines the molecular evolution of humans. He graduated from the Charles University at Prague in 1955, and received his MS in Botany from the same school in 1958. From 1977 to his retirement in 2004, he was the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biology at Tübingen, Germany.

Listeners: Colm O'hUigin

Colm O'hUigin is a senior staff scientist at the US National Cancer Institute. He received his BA, MSc and PhD at the Genetics Department of Trinity College, Dublin where he later returned as a lecturer. He has held appointments at the Center for Population and Demographic Genetics, UT Houston, and at the University of Cambridge. As an EMBO fellow, he moved in 1990 to the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany to work with Jan Klein and lead a research group studying the evolutionary origins of immune molecules, of teeth, trypanosomes and of species.

Tags: class I antigen, class II antigen

Duration: 5 minutes, 11 seconds

Date story recorded: August 2005

Date story went live: 24 January 2008