ECAM is waiting for eCAM

To wait is to live. Every aspect of our existence requires, demands and includes waiting. We wait for our research grants to be funded, our manuscripts to be accepted. For those of us who are on the way up, we wait to be promoted based on our scholarly involvement. Some of us, in fact, most of us are professors of various ranks and disciplines in universities throughout the world. Regardless of rank, we must also wait for responses (favorable we hope) from our students (mostly medical) who we anticipate will submit clear and objective polite comments concerningmerits of our teaching efforts.We expect the same from referees of our manuscripts. Thus we all wait. Waiting has permeated other areas, perhaps less tangible to us as biomedical researchers. There is the well-known theatre piece of Samuel Beckett: ‘Waiting for Godot’ which emphasizes a philosophical (existentialist) view of waiting connected to our living. Closer to home, Azumi et al. (1) even use this theme of ‘Waiting for Godot’ in a search for molecular linkages between the immune systems of invertebrate animals (protochordates are our nearest ancestors) and vertebrates. Thus, the pervasiveness of waiting always includes that which may be uncertain and may be accompanied by either the thrill and/or dread of waiting. Then moving closer to biomedical research before the invertebrate and vertebrate connection, ‘Waiting for the End’ by Niels K. Jerne (2) prefaces the then current state of immunology in advance of network theory and then clonal selection that of course we know as a Darwinian corollary. Both Beckett and Jerne, Nobel Laureates, poles apart, focused on waiting from the point of view of two widely different disciplines. There is even a hint of this theme in one of the many serious essays of Janeway (3) in relation to immunology and the asymptote, a line or curve that approaches a given curve arbitrarily close. And even more recently we recognize an extension of this direction. There is an attempt to solidify years of grappling with invertebrate immune systems and understanding signaling so essential for initiating an immune response beginning with the perception and reception of an antigen, and its fit to a proper receptor (4,5). Our entry into this debate of course refers to TOLL, one of the prominent pathways that explain the intimacy of linkages of early mechanisms of invertebrate innate immune systems with those of vertebrates—leaving less of a schism than we would have thought existed during the 19th century. This was an incredibly unique period in biology when Metchnikoff destroyed the prevailing monolith that shrouded immunology but dividing us into the cellular and humoral camps (6). And of course he accomplished this coup following enormous persistence using evidence derived from the observation of phagocytosis in marine invertebrates. Just think, simple observations of innate responses in invertebrates changed the very course of immunology and there is promise of invertebrates moving us into other directions of even more clinical relevance (5,7). Signaling in the organism especially in the immune system through the TOLL pathway is indeed crucial to understanding how the immune system works at the cellular level in humans. Animal models have been one current subject upon which eCAM has focused. Having just returned from active participation at the 13th EFIS (European Federation Immunological Societies: Symposium on Signaling, Balaton, Hungary), I am particularly eager to draw our reader’s attention to this subject of signaling as it could relate to CAM (8,9). For this would widen the boundaries of eCAM and increase its depth (10). Why is ECAM waiting for eCAM? In our quest to raise the standards of CAM we are searching for evidence. Now at the completion of Volume 2, where are we? eCAM has covered all aspects of research that require evidence from representatives of every group in the animal kingdom (invertebrates and vertebrates). And the material presented concerning For reprints and all correspondence: Edwin L. Cooper, PhD, ScD, Distinguished Professor, Laboratory of Comparative Neuroimmunology, Department of Neurobiology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1763, USA. Tel: þ1-310825-9567; Fax: þ1-310-825-2224; E-mail: [email protected]