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On the Essential Identity of the Antibodies

Department of Bacteriology, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University

Abstract

Since Ehrlich's first classical analysis of antibodies, it has been a generally accepted conception of immunity that agglutinins, precipitins, sensitizers, bacteriolysins, hemolysins, or the so-called amboceptors, opsonins and the anaphylactic antibodies are separate substances formed in the animal body, often in response to treatment with a single antigen. Kraus, in the first edition of Kolle and Wassermann's Handbook, summarizes this point of view unambiguously in the following words:

Just as the bacterial body contains a variety of different antigens, so we may assume that animal protein is made up of a large number of different antigenic elements. If the animal body is treated with such substances and finds corresponding receptors, there results the formation of a variety of qualitatively different antibodies....

When Gengou, in 1902, noted that alexin or complement was fixed when a precipitating antiserum was added to its homologous antigen, he interpreted this as meaning that, in addition to precipitins, the antiserum contained other antibodies—the "albuminolysins."