ABOVE: Courtesy of Noel Rose and JHU
Science is full of ideas that have been proven wrong. Up until the 1950s, one prevailing view among scientists was that the body could not produce antibodies against itself. This concept, known as horror autotoxicus, or the fear of self-toxicity, was coined in the 19th century by Paul Ehrlich, a German physician-scientist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his contributions to immunology.
Nearly half a century later, horror autotoxicus was overturned by Ernest Witebsky, a protégé of one of Ehrlich’s trainees, with the help of Witebsky’s student, Noel Rose.
When Rose joined Witebsky’s lab at the University at Buffalo in 1951, Witebsky was studying organ-specific antigens—molecules that make different cell types functionally distinct. Witebsky was particularly interested in thyroglobulin, a large protein found exclusively in cells of the thyroid gland, and he gave Rose the task of identifying the properties that made ...
