The essential self: a commentary on Silverstein and Rose “On the mystique of the immunological self”

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Abstract
Summary: Historical precedent supports an argument that a variety of factors, including the physical and chemical nature of the antigen, dose, timing, mode of access to the immune system, etc., combine to make a self‐nonself discrimination. This argument requires that specificity be ignored and the myriad of parameters that affect the class and magnitude of the response be dealt with — what might be called the immunogenicity‐tolerogenicity discrimination. Just as there can be no immune response if there are no specific receptors available, so the presence of immune receptors does not guarantee that an immune response will occur, and factors that contribute to the regulation of the magnitude and class of the immune response cannot be used to determine if a receptor is anti‐self or anti‐nonself.

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