PROTEIN METABOLISM, CELL FORMATION, AND IMMUNITY

Abstract

Normally, a man can boast that some time during the first year of life he got up and stood on his own two legs. But it would be an idle boast indeed if modern man should ever claim that during his lifetime he actually stood alone. It is almost unnecessary to state, therefore, that the research for which this award has been given was not the product of one individual. It was based upon the works of those who searched before and it was accomplished through the efforts of many persons: among these were Dr. John Craig, whose knowledge of cells and tissues made most of these studies possible, Dr. Jesuś Kumate and his colleagues in Mexico, who brought our interests in the placental transfer of proteins to reality, and Dr. Charles Janeway, without whose support and encouragement all of our ideas would have been stillborn.

To review briefly our studies of the last seven years, as required by the rules governing this award, it has been necessary to select and discard. What has finally been chosen, for better or worse, are those studies dealing with natural developmental sequences in the metabolism of the plasma gamma-globulins and the antibody properties that these proteins manifest–or to be euphemistic, those studies concerned with the immunological ages of man.

The antibodies of normal human plasma represent four related groups of proteins. The largest of these groups in terms of quantity are the 7S gamma₂-globulins which constitute 70 to 75% of the total gammaglobulins in the normal adult; these have a molecular weight of 165,000 and, as their name indicates, have an ultracentrifugal sedimentation coefficient of 7 Svedbergs, or 7S.^1,2