Abstract

GOMEZ GUTIERREZ, ALBERTO. On vaccines and serotherapies: the founding of a science that obtained twenty seven Nobel prizes in the XXth century. Infect. [online]. 2007, vol.11, n.2, pp.71-77. ISSN 0123-9392.

Based upon the pioneering works that are described in the present paper and which correspond to the first five Nobel prizes related to immunology, and also on other scientific findings mainly in Europe, a new science would be created. One hundred and sixteen years after the Budapest congress to which Metchnikov, Roux and other protoimmunologists attended, and in the same city of Budapest upon the Danube, this new science would receive the name of Immunomics to refer to its interdependence with contemporary genomics. Between one date and the other, all along the XX century, the Nobel Committee would attribute twenty seven prizes to scientists in the field of medicine who worked in the fundamentals of the science that was once called immunology, and which in the XXIth century will probably deal on the principles of susceptibility and genetic conditioning to develop a certain type of reaction which will not be called as in ancient times rubor, tumor, ache and heat, neither as in the XXth century according to isolated levels of soluble or membrane proteins and their corres-ponding intracellular signals in different cellular subpopulations, but according to the new concepts of immunomics and immunocibernetics and other sciences of complex systems which will better account for the interactions within the organisms themselves besides their interactions with environmental factors.

Keywords : immunology; immunomics; Nobel prizes; vacccines; serotherapy.