Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Immunology, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892.
For many years immunologists have been well served by the viewpoint that the immune system's primary goal is to discriminate between self and non-self. I believe that it is time to change viewpoints and, in this essay, I discuss the possibility that the immune system does not care about self and non-self, that its primary driving force is the need to detect and protect against danger, and that it does not do the job alone, but receives positive and negative communications from an extended network of other bodily tissues.