Читать книгу The Organism as a Whole, from a Physicochemical Viewpoint - Jacques Loeb - Страница 12

4. Fifty or sixty years ago surgeons did not hesitate to transfuse the blood of animals into human beings. The practice was a failure, and Landois39 showed by experi­ment that if blood of a foreign species was introduced into an animal the blood corpuscles of the transfused blood were rapidly dissolved and the animal into which the transfusion was made was rendered ill and often died. The result was different when the animals whose blood was used for the purpose of transfusion belonged to the same species or a species closely related to the animal into which the blood was transfused. Thus when blood was exchanged between horse and donkey or between wolf and dog or between hare and rabbit no hemoglobin appeared in the urine and the animal into which the blood was transfused remained well.40 This was the beginning of the investiga­tions in the field of serum specificity which were destined to play such a prominent rôle in the development of medicine. Friedenthal was able to show later that if to 10 c.c. of serum of a mammal three drops of defibrinated blood of a foreign species are added and the whole is exposed in a test tube to a temperature of 38°C. for fifteen minutes the blood cells contained in the added blood are all cytolyzed; that this, however, does not occur so rapidly when the blood of a related species is used. He could thus show that human blood serum dissolves the erythrocytes of the eel, the frog, pigeon, hen, horse, cat, and even that of the lower monkeys but not that of the anthropoid apes. The blood of the chimpanzee and of the human are no longer incompatible, and this discovery was justly considered by Friedenthal as a confirma­tion of the idea of the evolu­tionists that the anthropoid apes and the human are blood rela­tions.41

This line of investiga­tion had in the meanwhile entered upon a new stage when Kraus, Tchistowitch, and Bordet discovered and developed the precipitin reac­tion, which consists in the fact that if a foreign serum (or a foreign protein) is introduced into an animal the blood serum of the latter acquired after some time the power of causing a precipitate when mixed with the antigen, i.e., with the foreign substance originally introduced into the animal for the purpose of causing the produc­tion of antibodies in the latter; while, of course, no such precipita­tion occurs if the serum of a non-treated rabbit is mixed with the serum of the blood of the foreign species.

In 1897 Kraus discovered that if the filtrates from cultures of bacteria (e.g., typhoid bacillus) are mixed with the serum of an animal immunized with the same serum (e.g., typhoid serum) it causes a precipitate; and that this precipitin reac­tion is specific. This fact was confirmed and has been extended by the work of many authors.

Tchistowitch in 1899 observed that the serum of rabbits which had received injec­tions of horse or eel serum caused a precipitate when mixed with the serum of these latter animals.

Bordet found in 1899 that if milk is injected into a rabbit the serum of such a rabbit acquires the power of precipitating casein, and Fish found that this reac­tion is specific inasmuch as the lactoserum from cow’s milk can precipitate only the casein of cow’s milk but not that of human or goat milk. Wassermann and Schütze reached the same result independently of each other.

Myers and later Uhlenhuth showed that if white of egg from a hen’s egg is injected into a rabbit, precipitins for white of egg are found in the serum of the latter, and Uhlenhuth42 found, by trying the white of egg of different species of birds, that the precipitin reac­tion called forth by the blood of the immunized animal is specific, inasmuch as the proteins from a hen’s egg will call forth the forma­tion of precipitins in the blood of the rabbit which will precipitate only the white of egg of the hen or of closely related birds.

To Nuttall43 belongs the credit of having worked out a quantitative method for measuring the amount of precipitate formed, and in this way he made it possible to draw more valid conclusions concerning the degree of specificity of the precipitin reac­tion. He found by this method that when the immune serum is mixed with the serum or the protein solu­tion used for the immuniza­tion a maximum precipitate is formed, but if it is mixed with the serum of related forms a quantitatively smaller precipitate is produced. In this way the degree of blood rela­tionship could be ascertained. He thus was able to show that when the blood of one species, e.g., the human, was injected into the blood of a rabbit, after some time the serum of the rabbit was able to cause a precipitate not only with the serum of man, or chimpanzee, but also of some lower monkeys; with this difference, however, that the precipitate was much heavier when the immune serum was added to the serum of man. The method thus shows the existence of not an absolute but of a strong quantitative specificity of blood serum. This statement may be illustrated by the following table from Nuttall. The antiserum used for the precipitin reac­tion was obtained by treating a rabbit with human blood serum. The forty-five bloods tested had been preserved for various lengths of time in the refrigerator with the addi­tion of a small amount of chloroform.

TABLE II

Quantitative Tests with Anti-Primate Sera

Tests with Antihuman Serum

Blood of	Precipitum Amount	Percentage
Primates
Man		.0310	100
Chimpanzee		.0400	130 (loose precipitum)
Gorilla		.0210	064
Ourang		.0130	042
Cynocephalus mormon		.0130	042
Cynocephalus sphinx		.0090	029
Ateles geoffroyi		.0090	029
Insectivora
Centetes ecaudatus		.0000	000
Carnivora
Canis aureus		.0030	010 (loose precipitum)
Canis familiaris		.0010	003
Lutra vulgaris		.0030	010 (concentrated serum)
Ursus tibetanus		.0025	008
Genetta tigrina		.0010	003
Felis domesticus		.0010	003
Felis caracal		.0008	003
Felis tigris		.0005	002
Ungulata
Ox		.0030	010
Sheep		.0030	010
Cobus unctuosus		.0020	007
Cervus porcinus		.0020	007
Rangifer tarandus		.0020	007
Capra megaceros		.0005	002
Equus caballus		.0005	002
Sus scrofa		.0000	000
Rodentia
Dasyprocta cristata		.0020	007 (concentrated serum clots)
Guinea-pig		.0000	000
Rabbit		.0000	000
Marsupialia
Petrogale xanthopus
Petrogale penicillata
Onychogale frenata
Onychogale unguifera	.0000	000
Onychogale unguifera
Macropus bennetti
Thylacinus cynocephalus