MEMORY GAME © MATTHIAS KULKA/CORBIS. PATHOGENS: © SEBASTIAN KAULITZKI/SHUTTERSTOCK; © ISTOCK.COM/AUNT_SPRAY
Infectious-disease specialist Mihai Netea has a small round scar on his upper left arm: the telltale blemish of a Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination against tuberculosis that he received as a baby in Romania. The country is a high-risk area for Mycobacterium tuberculosis infections, and the vaccine would have protected Netea against the disease for more than a decade. It might even have protected him, albeit for a shorter time, against a range of other infections. And now Netea, who runs a lab at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and other immunologists are beginning to understand why.
A few years ago, Netea was investigating how the immune response to M. tuberculosis changes following BCG vaccination. One day his group got a bizarre result in a control ...
