The next movie about James Bond, the hero with lisence to kill, will be the 27th film in the series. Immunologists don’t need to wait several years between each time we get to see and hear new stories about secret agents with lisence to kill. We’ve got the killer T-cells. Continue reading
Recipes for cream cakes often go down through Norwegian families. The exact combination of filling and decoration can vary substantially from family to family. But no one is ever in doubt that the result is cream cake, nor that the cake looks yummy. Continue reading
I love picking mushrooms, especially funnel chanterelles. They are small, brown and easy to recognize on their yellow, slightly angular stem, which is hollow from the hat down to the root. In addition the gills under the cap extends down the stem. Yet, in recent years I have become more careful when I pick and clean the funnel chanterelles. Continue reading
When my boyfriend finally returned from Africa in 1989, two years of intense letter writing came to an end. I had written about my life as a budding researcher, he about his life as a volunteer in the bush. Still I became a bit puzzled the morning of our reunion in Paris, when he after a night in a cheap hotel bed announced that he had dreamt that we were competing peptides in the HLA groove!
Our bodies continuously encounter microbes that pose potential or actual threats to our survival. Our immune system has to be able to detect all possible threats to our bodies, whatever shape or form they may take. So how does the immune system recognize a threat? Continue reading
In 1845 a group of Dutchmen emigrated to South America and founded a colony in Suriname. Two weeks after their arrival 180 people died from typhoid fever. Two years later another 37 died of yellow fever. These two epidemics killed more than half of the Dutch emigrants in Suriname.
HLA molecules are the cells’ noticeboards. They show forth what is inside cells
In 1979, more than 100 years later, blodbank doctors in the Netherlands began to unravel the mystery of these devastating epidemics. Was it arbitrary who survived the diseases? If not, what protected some people but not others? The doctors compared the 4th generation immigrants in Suriname and Dutch blood donors.