HLA in the 1950’s: Asking Why
It’s important to recognize that, while this post is not going into the details here, there is a ton of science that built the groundwork for HLA discovery. Science is always building on science.
As it is in science, the story of HLA is all about confusion and curiosity, with the question ‘why’ leading the charge. Why do some patients react to transplantations and blood transfusions when others do not? This patient has never been transfused so why do their white blood cells agglutinate (aka stick together, leukoagglutination)? Why would some patient samples leukoagglutinate while other samples don’t?
Researchers dove in to answer the questions, but only came back with more questions.
Alloantigens are antigens that are present in some people but not in others and can trigger an immune response. Could this explain the reactivity? Were there alloantigens present on white blood cells or weren’t there? Maybe it was an autoimmune issue? It took a majority of this decade to confirm that there were, in fact, alloantigens on white blood cells (our first glimpse at HLA, though we didn’t know it yet).
During this time, it was more about questions and less about answers.
At this point, there was no nomenclature system because researchers weren’t sure what they were looking at.
Ok.
Alloantigens exist on white blood cells.
Now what?
Reference
If you’re curious about the development of HLA’s story in more detail, History of HLA: Ten Recollections is a series of essays written by the leading researchers detailing their experiences on the journey to understanding the HLA/MHC system. This links to a PDF copy on Paul Terasaki’s website.
- Terasaki PI, Dausset J. Payne R, van Rood JJ, van Leeuwen A, Amos DB, Walford RL, Kissmeyer-Nielsen F, Svejgaard A, Batchelor JR, Bach FH. 1990. History of HLA: Ten Recollections.. Los Angeles (CA): The Regents of the University of California.
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