Susumu Ohno dedication volume
This volume is dedicated to Susumu Ohno on the occasion of his 70th birthday by his friends and associates
Editors: Michael Schmid, Würzburg, Harold P. Klinger, New York, N.Y.

Paper

At the feet of the master: the search for universalities. Divining the evolutionary selection pressures that resulted in an immune system
M. Cohn

Conceptual Immunology Group, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla CA (USA)

Address of Corresponding Author

Cytogenet Cell Genet 1998;80:54-60 (DOI: 10.1159/000014957)

  Sorry, there is no abstract. Read the first few lines of the text instead!

Abstract.

Susumu Ohno is a special friend to me. We view the world differently but we have learned more from our differences than we would have from our similarities. Susumu lives in an Aristotelian world as an intuitive scientist whose view of biology is derived from the contradiction between the monotonous repetition, willful caprice and shameless waste of the evolutionary process, and his search for universalities of beauty, elegance and parsimony. He seeks the most general of laws and has a passion for understanding. I, on the other hand, am not trustful of my intuition and only feel comfortable in a Cartesian world in which the assumptions underlying experiments and the deductions from them are made transparent. We both feel that a good theory questions the data with the same validity that good data question the theory.

  Author Contacts

Request reprints from Dr. Melvin Cohn, Conceptual Immunology Group,The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 10010 North Torrey Pines Road,La Jolla, CA 92037 (USA); telephone: 619-453-4100;fax: 619-453-4133; e-mail: Cohn@Salk.edu

  Article Information

Dedicated to Dr. Susumu Ohno on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

Supported by NIH grant RR07716. This paper was written while Melvin Cohn was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland USA.

Received: Received 19 January 1998;
manuscript accepted 23 January 1998.
Number of Print Pages : 7
Number of Figures : 3, Number of Tables : 0, Number of References : 6