"Blish, James - To Pay the Piper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

"Word games," Hamelin said.
"Not at all," Mudgett interposed. "We were going to spare
you the theoretical reasoning behind our project, Mr. Sec-
retary, but now you'll just have to sit still for it. The fact is
that the body's ability to distinguish between its own cells and
those of some foreign tissuea skin graft, say, or a bacterial
invasion of the bloodisn't an inherited ability. It's a learned
reaction. Furthermore, if you'll think about it a moment,
you'll see that it has to be. Body cells die, too, and have to be
disposed of; what would happen if removing those dead cells
provoked an antibody reaction, as the destruction of foreign
cells does? We'd die of anaphylactic shock while we were
still infants.
"For that reason, the body has to learn how to scavenge
selectively. In human beings, that lesson isn't learned com-
pletely until about a month after birth. During the intervening
time, the newborn infant is protected by antibodies that it
gets from the colestrum, the 'first milk' it gets from the breast
during the three or four days immediately after birth. It can't
generate its own; it isn't allowed to, so to speak, until it's
learned the trick of cleaning up body residues without
triggering the antibody mechanisms. Any dead cells marked
'personal' have to be dealt with some other way."
"That seems clear enough," Hamelin said. "But I don't see
its relevance."
"Well, we're in a position now where that differentiation
between the self and everything outside the body doesn't do us
any good any more. These mutated bacteria have been
'selfed' by the mutation. In other words, some of their protein
molecules, probably desoxyribonucleic acid molecules, carry
configurations or 'recognition units' identical with those of our
body cells, so that the body can't tell one from another."
"But what has all this to do with re-education?"
"Just this," Carson said. "What we do here is to impose
upon the cells of the bodyall of thema new set of
recognition units for the guidance of the lymph nodes and
the spleen, which are the organs that produce antibodies. The
new units are highly complex, and the chances of their being
duplicated by bacterial evolution, even under forced draft,
are too small to worry about. That's what Re-Education is.
In a few moments, if you like, we'll show you just how it's
done."
Hamelin ground out his fifth cigarette in Mudgett's ash
tray and placed the tips of his fingers together thoughtfully.
Carson wondered just how much of the concept of recognition-
marking the Under Secretary had absorbed. It had to be
admitted that he was astonishingly quick to take hold of
abstract ideas, but the self-marker theory of immunity was
like everything else in immunologyalmost impossible to
explain to laymen, no matter how intelligent.