https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1975-4737
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Patricia J Gearhart, Beverly A Mock, Rafael Casellas, Michael P Cancro, The Reign of Antibodies: A Celebration of and Tribute to Michael Potter and His Homogeneous Immunoglobulin Workshops, The Journal of Immunology, Volume 200, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 23–26, https://doi.org/10.4049/jimmunol.1701516
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A perfect storm was brewing by the mid-1960s that was destined to pit prevailing assumptions of the new molecular biology against accumulating observations from immunology that would challenge these beliefs. Several intractable enigmas fueled the looming tempest. From the side of molecular biology, the “one gene, one polypeptide” dictum was an accepted extension of the central dogma, as was the notion that the somatic genome was a sacrosanct unchanging entity and that genetic recombination only occurred during germ cell formation. From the side of immunology, the recently appreciated phenomena of self-recognition (1) and acquired tolerance (2) had yielded a set of concepts that comprised the clonal selection theory (3–5). Key to this idea was the notion that B cells had unique AgRs, whose specificity mirrored that of the Ab the cells eventually produced. This, coupled with the well-established specificity of immune responses, implied that the inventory of such receptors, and therefore Abs, must be astronomical. Hence the puzzle: how was a seemingly infinite array of clonally distributed specificities generated by the currently held axioms of molecular biology?
