Editor's note: Citation Classics Commentaries were written by the authors of some of the studies that were the most highly cited papers between 1961 and 1975. The essays were originally published between 1977 and 1993 in Current Contents, a publication of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now Thomson Scientific. (ISI was founded by Eugene Garfield, also the founder of The Scientist.)
In this essay, published in 1980, Nathan Kaliss describes the experiments that opened the door to developing immunosuppressants for organ transplant and cancer immunotherapy. Kaliss described the phenomenon of "immunological enhancement" in 1952, reporting that mice simultaneously treated with a steroid and foreign tumor cells were immunized to their own tumor cells. That work laid the foundation for research on using antibodies to target tumors in animal models of cancer. His review on the subject, published in 1958, has been cited nearly 500 times, ...
