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Much modern research is quite focused, attempting to understand aspects of systems that are already revealed in broad outline. Researching a problem at its birth is an opportunity that many will never experience, a lonely exercise that many may avoid. In these situations, pre-existing findings from other scientists offer only limited help. Years or even decades may be necessary to make real progress, and most discouragingly, the initial surprising findings may be of limited interest to scientists focused on more established systems or problems. Working on such a novel problem has its perks: witnessing an unexpected new biological system come to light is uniquely exciting, even if the emergence is gradual. The Pillars papers by Cudkowicz and Bennett reviewed here (1, 2) represent a good example of such emergent research. They focused on a phenomenon mediated by cells (NK cells) that had not yet been discovered and that use a recognition strategy that had not yet been conceived. As a graduate student in the late 1970s, I was introduced to these papers by my supervisor, Michael Bevan, and found them intriguing. However, it is fair to say that the studies were of middling interest to most immunologists at that time, probably because they made little sense within the prevailing paradigms. Dr. Cudkowicz died young, at age 54 in 1982, well before his phenomenon was understood. Dr. Bennett lived to see, and indeed contribute to, the evolution of his findings into a basic understanding of how MHC molecules inhibit NK cell functions, before he died recently in January 2015.

Issue Section:
Pillars of Immunology
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