Cancer antigens: how specific should they be?

INTRODUCTION Four years have passed since the last comprehensive meeting was held to discuss directions in which the immunological discipline might contribute to an understanding of cancer problems, and it should be a measure of our progress to compare the content of the papers presented at that meeting with those delivered here. The earlier meeting did not have precisely the same objectives as this one, and I understand our present purpoae to be a critical discussion restricted to experts. I have therefore chosen to modify the title assigned to me ("Cancer-specific Antigens") in order to focus attention on several aspects of this subject of which you may all be implicitly aware, but which are sometimes difficult ~ to = keep explicitly in mind. Some of the limitations we shall be concerned with are those of method; others are of communication. If I may offer a relevant paragraph from Aldous Huxley's "Along the Road," "Most of our mistakes are fundamentally grammatical. We create our own difficulties by employing an inadequate language to describe facts. Thus, to take one example, we are constantly giving the same name to more than one thing, and more than one name to the same thing. The results , when we come to argue, are deplorable. For we are using a language which does not adequately describe the things about which we are arguing ." As immunologists we may have reason to suspect that all other scientxsts feel this way about us as a group, entrapped as we are wxth our circular definitions of antigen and antibody. In the topic under consideration here, we compound our mis-demeanor by juxtaposing the words cancer and specific. In doing this we convert a scientific con