Thanks for the Memories

B and T cells may be the memory masters of the immune system, but research reveals that other cells can be primed by pathogens, too.

Written byRuth Williams

| 13 min read

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cards for a memory game, with pictures of pathogens turned over

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Ruth Williams
Ruth is a freelance journalist. Before freelancing, Ruth was a news editor for the Journal of Cell Biology in New York and an assistant editor for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in London. Prior to that, she was a bona fide pipette-wielding, test tube–shaking, lab coat–shirking research scientist. She has a PhD in genetics from King’s College London, and was a postdoc in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Today she lives and writes in Connecticut.
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