Immunology Today, vol. 5, No. 10, 1984

Immunology of the Lung and Upper Respiratory Tract by John Bienenstock, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984. £32.95 (xiv + 414pages) I S B N 0 07 005215 8 To make this book, John Bienenstock assembled 19 chapters by 34 contribu- tors, most of whom, though by no means all, are from the North American conti- nent.

According to its description, the book is intended 'for all students of immuno- logy and respirology.. .people in many branches of medicine.. .biologists, vet- erinarians and so on'. A comprehensive list indeed, and allowing that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, there will be some who will find the book disap- pointing.

The chapters are of two main types; those of general, introductory nature, and those which deal specifically with the immune response to respiratory patho- gens and other well-defined, clinical problems. On the whole, the specialized chapters are the most satisfactory but, in spite of well set out tables and line- diagrams, some of them might be heavy going for a non-clinician with no prior knowledege of anatomy, physiology or pathology. Inevitably, perhaps, there is in these chapters some repetition and overlap but the main failing of the book is that the more general chapters never really succeed in pulling it together. There is a good, simple, first chapter on the structure of the respiratory tract but after that I found the going uneven, to

say the least. I suspect that this is partly because John Bienenstock wanted to put over the view that the lung 'is a gut that breathes', and that the immune respon- ses in the wall of the gut can be taken as models for what happens at other mucous surfaces. They cannot. Even in health (and in many mammals, well before birth) the gut is provided superabundantly with lymphoid tissue, not only because it may be particularly at risk but because it is the site of B cell maturation, analagous in many ways to the avian bursa. The lung is quite dif- ferent: it is quiescent before birth, and very special pleading is needed to sustain the case that the lymphoid tissue con- tained in a healthy lung can bear a funda- mental comparison, either in quantative or qualitative terms, with that of the gut. Indeed, the lung has to be protected from too large an influx of leucocytes; when this happens the process is called pneumonia, and it can be fatal. Further, the lung has unique features of its own, foremost among which is the very low pressure of its blood circulation and the corresponding delicacy of the vascular endothelium. The clinical and immuno- logical implications of the fluid dynamics of the lung get scant treatment in the introductory chapters of this book. While I shall not go into them here I believe none the less, that even the 'purist' immunologists should be made to understand why, when immunologi- cally competent cells are adoptively transferred, by the intravenous route, they often end up in the lungs. Such understanding might help to engender a healthy scepticism about the validity of many experiments which purport to

305

show 'homing' of lymphoid cells to various organs. Valid or not, the results of experiments on mice should not be extrapolated promiscuously to man, or any other species. A little of such healthy scepticism might have leavened to advantage the impenetrably detailed chapter on the function of the tonsils, which managed to mention nearly every- thing but the kitchen sink and the cer- vical lymph nodes.

There are other bones of contention in this book which it would be fun to debate but time and space are limited, and I do not mean to carp. This is certainly a book which should have been written, and if George Bernard Shaw was right to say that if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing badly, then the author needs no defence. There is much of value and interest in the book, and it will repay a lot of dipping into but, at any rate for me, it fails to impress as a coherent whole. There is one reason for this that is not the author's fault, and that is that at the level of basic immunology there are insuffi- cient facts. We really do not know yet how mucosal immunity works and, with the exception of oral polio, we have no practical vaccine that will realiably stimulate the flow of specific, secretory antibodies when and where we want them. Let us hope that John Bienenstock has not yet shot his BALT and that when the facts become known he will use his undoubted talents as a communicator to explain them to us. In the meantime, I shall not be sorry to have this book on my shelves. [ ~

JoE HALL Joe Hall is at the Chester Beatty Research Institute, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5PX, UK.

Fundamentals of Immunology, 2nd Edn.

by Quentin N. Myrvik and Russell S. Weiser, Lea and Febiger, 1984. $2Z OO (xii + 510 pages) I S B N 0 8121 0866 3

This is a multi-author book now in its second edition, written to a generally high standard, by a group of senior American microbiologists, clinical immunologists and physicians. Myrvik and Weiser themselves write most of the chapters on fundamental immunobio- logy and immunopathology, Donald Evans reviews aspects of immunochem- istry and complement with particular clarity, and six other authors cover the range of clinically related subjects. In both scope and quality of presentation the book has much to its credit; the tables are informative and relevant and, although a little sparse for a basic text, the illustrations are useful, with the

exception of two execrable histology pic- tures. In my view this book serves the needs of students better than several others that have been revised or recently published - it is certainly worthy of con- sideration by undergraduates in medi- cine and biology as an introductory text.

Like all books of its type, however, it fails to present a contemporary appraisal of significant recent discoveries that affect our interpretation of the immune system and its biology - a risk taken by authors tackling a subject in which tile pace of research is unrivalled. This is perhaps less true of the authors of this book; they are only really culpable of misdemeanour in the poor description of lymphoid tissue organization and the handling of antigenic material - a defect sadly only too common, but all the more surprising here in view of the predomi- nance of microbiologists in the author list. To compensate, the book makes an excellent job of cellular eJector

mechanisms of immunity with a proper stress on their relevance in anti-micro- bial activities. I was puzzled by the assumption that readers would know the terms TEMI and TETI which have not entered my list of useful acronyms: it may represent an attempt to differentiate T (E)ffector cells for (M)icrobial and (T)issue and (I)mmunity which is probably unjustifed.

For a book revised and published in 1984, it seems rather poor in describing the antigenic basis of individuality in the context ofpolymorphic products of signi- ficant gene systems: a brief account of the history of the MHC would have been welcome and more could have been done to review the properties of class I and class II molecules in targeting and regu- lating the immune system. [ ~

DAVID CATTY

David Catty is in the Department of lmmunolo~y~ University of Birmingham, UK.