Self-Tolerance and Autoimmunity in the Thyroid

Abstract

Among the fundamental observations and concepts on which the science of immunology was founded in the beginning of the 20th century was the recognition that animals do not as a rule make antibodies against their own body constituents. In 1900 Ehrlich and Morgenroth¹ described how they injected goats intraperitoneally with blood of other goats and looked for the development of lysins in the blood of the recipients. These lysins were regularly found, and, moreover, reacted with blood of many other goats but never with that of the recipients. Ehrlich recognized that "the organism has contrivances by means of which the . . .