Smith graduated in 1964 from Denison University with a B.S. in biology, then summa cum laude from The Ohio State University College of Medicine in 1968. After clinical training in medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and Hematology/Oncology at the NCI, while a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth Medical School, and L’Institut de Cancerologie et d’Immunogenetique in Villejuif France, Smith embarked on an investigative career that focused on fundamental studies of cell proliferation that evolved to the study of immunology. By the 1970s, it became clear that immune responses are due to lymphocytes, but how these responses are initiated and regulated was not at all understood. At the time, many mysterious activities had been found in culture media conditioned by growth of white blood cells, but no one had characterized the molecules responsible. Thus, it was unclear how they might be involved in immunity, and it was impossible to proceed further experimentally. In just seven years, from 1977 to 1984, Kendall Smith established the methods and criteria for the identification, isolation, purification and characterization of a new family of hormone-like molecules and their receptors, now termed interleukins, and established their centrality for immune responses. These discoveries ushered in the era of molecular immunity, which began in the 1980s and is still ongoing. Its impact on the diagnosis and treatment of immunological diseases, cancer, infectious diseases, and organ transplantation has been immeasurable.
“A fascinating look at a life in science, full of “eureka” moments and convoluted power plays.”
– Kirkus Reviews
BOOK REVIEW
THE INTERLEUKIN REVOLUTION
BY Kendall Smith
Smith looks back on his efforts to elucidate the immune system before his rivals beat him to it in this candid memoir.
The author recaps his career, from medical school through a two-decade stint as a medical professor at Dartmouth in the 1970s and 1980s, in which he made pioneering contributions to immunology. The book dives deep into his research on T cells—immune cells that destroy pathogens and provide long-term immunity—and the role of interleukin-2, a protein that promotes T-cell growth. Smith’s narrative features scenes of exhilarating discovery in which experiments worked beautifully and he gradually conceived a vision of interleukins as a set of hormones meticulously regulating the immune system. He twines these with an intimate portrait of cut-throat scientific competition: He recounts how he battled a hidebound immunological establishment, chewed out a journal editor for rejecting a paper, finessed the National Institutes of Health when it dragged its feet renewing his grant, and was backstabbed by a graduate student who stole a cell line his lab developed and sold it for $5,000 to a Japanese company that used it to publish an important finding just before he did (“In science, the only way to maintain one’s sanity and to stay in the game is to always look forward,” he concludes). Smith’s exposition is thorough and comprehensive, and readers see his work develop chronologically, from rudimentary hypotheses and experimentation on mysterious substances to a detailed understanding of molecules and mechanisms. The writing is sophisticated enough for scientists but sufficiently clear and straightforward for interested laypeople to follow, and the author describes lab work in down-to-earth prose that’s full of vivid detail: “I would walk over to the hospital…don my scrubs, and go into the operating room, where the surgeon would drop a tonsil into my cup of saline. Back in the lab…we would slice up the tonsil with a scalpel and forceps, releasing the individual lymphocytes.” The result is a gripping saga of science as a fraught and very human pursuit.
A fascinating look at a life in science, full of “eureka” moments and convoluted power plays.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2023
ADDITIONAL WORKS AVAILABLE
N-10: 981-4271-75-6 Molecular Immunity: A Chronology of 60 Years of Discovery, 2019
This book explains how the immune system functions, namely, how individual cells of the immune system make the decision to respond or not to respond to foreign microbes and molecules, and how the critical molecules function to trigger the cellular reactions in an all-or-none (quantal) manner. To date, there has not been a complete description of the immune system and its cells and molecules, primarily because most of the information has accumulated only in the last 40 years and our understanding has been expanding rapidly only in the last 20 years. It is now clear that the cells have evolved a way to ''count'' the number of foreign antigenic molecular ''hits'', and they only react when a critical number of events have accumulated. Subsequently, control over the reaction is transferred to a systemic lymphocytotrophic hormone system that determines the tempo, magnitude and duration of the immune reaction. This book explains in detail how the immune system, cells and molecules work for the first time. With this understanding as a basis, the pathogenesis of autoimmunity can now be understood as a mutational usurpation of the genes encoding molecules that participate in a sensitive feedback regulatory control of the immune reaction. By comparison, malignant transformation is understood as a mutational usurpation of the genes encoding the molecules that control the quantal decision to proliferate, so that normal ligand/receptor cell growth control is circumvented.
ISBN: 981323170X
The Quantal Theory of Immunity: The Molecular Basis of Autoimmunity and Leukemia, 2010
This book covers a scientific history of the discoveries in immunology of the past 60-years, i.e. what was discovered, who made the advances and how they accomplished them, and why others did not.
All molecular advances occurred in the last 60 years, and no one has described them.
ISBN: 9814271756
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