Eugene Russo | May 4, 2003 | 8 min read
D.F. Dowd Nearly one hundred years ago, two German scientists introduced the concept of autoimmune disease;1 it didn't catch on. Indeed, even the investigators themselves were skeptical. To most immunologists, the notion that people might develop immune reactions to their own bodies seemed counterintuitive, even preposterous. "People were very, very reluctant to accept the idea," says Noel Rose, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Autoimmune Disease Research and a long-time ex