Immunology for Nonimmunologists: Some Guidelines for Incipient Psychoneuroimmunologists

Abstract

One critical message of this workshop is that the immune system interacts with other physiological systems to produce an immune response. Indeed, the term “psychoneuroimmunology” was coined a few years ago by Ader (1981) primarily to highlight the interactive nature of the immune and the central nervous systems. Although by definition, psychoneuroimmunology is an integrative approach to the study of adaptation, those who might like to actively contribute towards understanding these interactions are often confronted by a significant logistic obstacle, namely the incredible and bewildering array of factual and conceptual information (often presented in an incomprehensible jargon) that constitutes the state of the art in the subdisciplines of immunology, neuroendocrinology and behavior. My purpose in writing these few pages and in presenting a glossary of “immunologese” is to try to outline a few of the facts, concepts and paradigms in immunology that may prove useful for the nonimmu-nologist who wishes to enter the arena of psychoneuroimmunology. My selection of concepts has been limited to those that, in my opinion, may prove relevant to understanding the connections between the immune system and the central nervous system. for example, although immunologists are now beginning to understand, in precise molecular and genetic terms, how an organism can produce antibodies of so many different combining specificities, the major conceptual advances underlying the generation of antibody diversity (Gearhart, 1982) are irrelevant (at least for the present) for promoting advances in psychoneuroimmunology. As psychoneuroimmunologists, we should be more interested in studying how the organism regulates amounts of antibody produced rather than in how somatic diversification comes about at the genomic level. With this rationale in mind, I will consider the following topics: lymphocyte circulation, the major histocompatibility complex, lymphocyte heterogeneity, and cell interactions and interleukins.