Moving Into Darkness: From Antibodies to the Brain

		Alan looks for the path from immunology to neuroscience

Alan Alda: You won the Nobel Prize for your work in immunology, and now here you are working on the brain, which seems like a whole other territory. Did you see a natural progression?

Gerry Edelman: It's always easy
backwards isn't it, to see a natural progression? But if you asked me the question beforehand, I would be nonplused. I wouldn't be able to answer it. The fact is that I got into immunology as a result of boredom. I was in the army in Paris and I was reading a book, and the book said a lot about antigens, the foreign molecules that assail your body and that you recognize as foreign, but it didn't say anything about antibodies. And so, in my naiveté, I said, you know, when I go back and do research, I'm going to work out how antibodies work.

So, I got a degree in physical chemistry and naively worked my way through this structure. How does your body recognize something that's foreign? Well, I don't want to get too high flown, my colleagues and I worked out the structure of the antibody molecule, and that structure gave the clue to how the thing could actually make such a repertoire of different kinds. They all looked alike, but each one was slightly different. It meant that some of them fit certain things better than others. Think of a mad locksmith making locks without keys and you make keys. But if you have 10 million locks and make me a thousand keys, my keys will fit a certain number of those locks.

So that worked out, and it started me thinking about how does the body recognize anything? So, I went from there to developmental biology: How do you inherit your grandmother's nose, something like that, and worked there for a while.

And finally, it occurred to me that there's something cognate or similar in the brain and in immunology -- namely your brain is also a recognition system. So you might call evolution, development, immunology, which is a special case, and brain science, sciences of recognition. They deal with the problem of how a thing without any foreknowledge, can match another thing, either an environment, or an antigen or a nerve impulse or what have you. It sounds very reasonable, doesn't it?

Alan Alda: In retrospect.

Gerry Edelman: Because we are in retrospect. So, I'm not going to swear on this, I mean, there is some rationale that did cause me to think a bit about it. But there's another thing. There are different kinds of scientists in this world. Some scientists love to work out every meticulous last detail. When I first went into immunology, there was an extraordinary group of people working and trying to figure out what's the real principle. Well, after this antibody structure was done, it was clear what the principle was. Before that it wasn't. So it went from a kind of open science to a closed science. There are many things in immunology still to be known, of a very important kind. But I feel, once I get to a certain stage, I've got to move sideways into the darkness. And that's where I am, in the dark. In the dark.

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