Preface: Happy 10th anniversary!

Excerpt

On January 1, 2012, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Department of Immunology will celebrate its 10th anniversary. This may come as a surprise to many of our colleagues around the world who are familiar with the long track record of accomplishments of Pittsburgh immunologists in the fields of vaccines, transplantation immunology, autoimmunity, and cancer immunology that reaches much further back than 10 years. Immunology, as a relatively young discipline, was until 2001 practiced at Pitt in basic science departments organized around the more traditional and more established disciplines and in several enlightened clinical departments that early on recognized the importance of this new science in health and disease. The Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Neils Jerne studied antibody-producing cells and developed the Jerne Plaque Assay in the Department of Microbiology that he chaired from 1962 to 1966. In 1947, Jonas Salk came to Pittsburgh and labored with his team in a small virology laboratory from which would emerge a vaccine against polio. The Tom E. Starzl Transplant Institute celebrated this year the 30th anniversary of the arrival of this famous transplant surgeon to Pittsburgh in 1981, where in the Department of Surgery chaired by a surgeon/immunologist Richard Simmons, some of the best transplantation immunology research was performed in support of clinical transplantation. Outstanding immunologists were making groundbreaking discoveries about HLA and diabetes in the Department of Pediatrics and others were addressing the new puzzle that was AIDS in our highly ranked School of Public Health. Cancer immunologists started coming to Pittsburgh in 1985 with the arrival of a famous immunologist Ronald Herberman who founded the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute with Immunology as one of its leading programs. …