John Haught on original sin: A conversation

Disquisitions on Original Antigenic Sin

Experiments in rabbits were designed to test the two unproven assumptions of the hypothesis proposed in the companion paper (1): that Original Antigenic Sin is fundamentally a restricted anamnestic response, and that there exists a trapping mechanism capable of deflecting antigen from one kind of cell and guiding it to another. It is shown that whole-body X-irradiation, sufficient to abolish pr...

Genetics of Original Sin

The continuous repetition of Christian de Duve’s primary thesis in Genetics of Original Sin ensures that however little the reader understands or is interested in biology, he will have no doubt as to the author’s primary concern: Natural selection has made humans poor prognosticators. As evolutionary adaptation is all about living (and reproducing) in the moment, humans have evolved some unfort...

Original sin and education.

Overcoming original (antigenic) sin.

Original antigenic sin describes a phenomenon in which the antibody response elicited in an individual after a secondary viral infection reacts more strongly to the viral variant that originally infected the individual. As T helper cells play critical roles in promoting antibody responses, a similar phenomenon may hold true for T helper cell responses. This concept is particularly relevant to t...

A Conversation with John Maier

T his year marks the 30th anniversary of the discovery of C60, the carbon cages affectionately known as buckyballs. Astronomers have long speculated that the molecules could be responsible for unusual features in the spectra of starlight, known as diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs). After two decades of research, John P. Maier, professor of chemistry at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, r...