The history of this text started years ago after reading Wittgenstein’s “Tratactus Logico-Philosophicus”. At some time later, it seemed to me a good idea to follow the “tratactus” structure to attempt to write a minimal description of the immune system. I finally did it for fun and hopefully to be useful to whomever reads it.

The text reflects my own personal view of the vertebrate’s immune system (IS). It is centered on concepts and ideas that were developed since 1986 based on work from my own lab1 and from Benedita Rocha’s lab2 and I’m greatly indebted to her for this. I have kept it short and focused on what I believe are the essential features of the IS. I’ve tried to avoid too much detail and most of the complex immunology jargon. If some now fashionable aspects of the IS are only superficially mentioned it is because I feel that they may be not so relevant after all. Perhaps for all these reasons I give no detailed sources and simply refer the reader to some general inspiring non-immunological references.

I look forward to raising in the general non-scientific reader an interest for an immune system where lymphocytes are mainly “concerned” with replication, survival factors and homing to the appropriate niche. This is the 1960s “sex, drugs and rock’n roll” view of the IS. Moreover, there are many concepts that are shared with other fields, e.g., ecology, economics.

I hope to stimulate quite a lot of discussion among those that study the Immune System. The text opens opportunities on Immunology teaching by focusing on concepts, interactions and their relatedness and all those as one. The readers may build frameworks of cross-references between statements that are not in line to create alternative reading paths. They should interact with each other to compare interpretations and refer to the immunology literature. They may create new connections, add new sub-sections, references and suggest modifications. To the medical doctor or the advanced specialist the text encapsulates the Immune System and provides a novel prism with which to approach Immunology. By attempting to always follow a logical line of thought, I end up by making new statements, some of which remain hypothetical, waiting for experimental testing, that change the current views of the IS. The purpose was that “each” statement should force the reader to stop, think and whenever possible, test. By doing so, I hope to provoke new questions and inspire new experimental approaches and research.

While working on this manuscript and looking for inspiration, I played many games of Shanghai II. Sometimes I got the cookie “Wise men learn much from fools…” There are many “fools” in science. Dear reader, please be wise.

Antonio A. de Freitas, MD, PhD

With the accelerating pace of genomic analysis and space exploration, the field of prebiotic evolution and astrobiology is poised for a century of unprecedented advances ahead, and there is a need for textbooks for students. The authors of this book, aware of the difficulty of covering the multifaceted subject by any single author, have decided to combine their efforts to provide a suitable book for beginning students from varied disciplines. The book stemmed from a meeting on Basic Questions about the Origin of Life at the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture in Erice, Sicily in October 2006, where Pier Luigi Luisi laid out a balanced program to approach the subject. The present book basically follows that program. The many authors have produced most thoughtful, authoritative and readable chapters on their areas so that the student may grasp the background, objective and progress of the major research foci in the field.

This book addresses one of the largest unmet needs in transplantation, the need to reduce late allograft loss. In the current era, it is reasonable to expect that most allografts will serve their recipients through their life span and death with preserved graft function the ultimate goal for all transplant recipients. However, long term allograft survival has not paralleled improvements made in short term survival. Each year a percentage of the existing organ transplant patients will lose their grafts. The problem of late allograft failure is due in part to pathogenic processes, to drug management, and to transplant patient care delivery.

This book pulls together the science in this area and serves as a resource and as a catalyst for further research. The book has been divided into sections covering the entirety of chronic allograft loss from basic science consideration to clinical implications. The goal of this book is to provide the reader with an overview of long term problems in solid organ transplantation. This overview not only includes the diagnosis of immunologic and non-immunologic causes of chronic graft loss but current management as well as novel therapies for future application. This book will make a useful contribution to the literature.

This book offers a general review of the voluminous theoretical and experimental literature pertaining to physical self-replicating systems. The principal focus here is on self-replicating machine systems. Most importantly, we are concerned with kinematic self-replicating machines: systems in which actual physical objects, not mere patterns of information, undertake their own replication. Following a brief burst of activity in the 1950s and 1980s, the field of kinematic replicating systems design received new interest in the 1990s with the emerging recognition of the feasibility of molecular nanotechnology. The field has experienced a renaissance of research activity since 1999 as researchers have come to recognize that replicating systems are simple enough to permit experimental laboratory demonstrations of working devices.

Nanomedicine, Volume IIA: Biocompatibility

The safety, effectiveness, and utility of medical nanorobotic devices will critically depend upon their biocompatibility with human organs, tissues, cells, and biochemical systems. In this Volume, we broaden the definition of nanomedical biocompatibility to include all of the mechanical, physiological, immunological, cytological, and biochemical responses of the human body to the introduction of artificial medical nanodevices, whether “particulate” (large doses of independent micron-sized individual nanorobots) or “bulk” (nanorobotic organs assembled either as solid objects or built up from trillions of smaller artificial cells or docked nanorobots inside the body) in form.

Molecular nanotechnology has been defined as the three-dimensional positional control of molecular structure to create materials and devices to molecular precision. The human body is comprised of molecules, hence the availability of molecular nanotechnology will permit dramatic progress in human medical services. More than just an extension of \"molecular medicine,\" nanomedicine will employ molecular machine systems to address medical problems, and will use molecular knowledge to maintain and improve human health at the molecular scale. Nanomedicine will have extraordinary and far-reaching implications for the medical profession, for the definition of disease, for the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions including aging, for our very personal relationships with our own bodies and ultimately for the improvement and extension of natural human biological structure and function. This book will be published in three volumes over the course of several years. Readers wishing to keep up-to-date with the latest developments may visit the nanomedicine website maintained by the Foresight Institute (http://foresight.org/Nanomedicine/index.html).