Editorial
Medical immunology: a new journal for a new subspecialty
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Correspondence: Kendall A Smith kasmith@med.cornell.edu
The Division of Immunology, Department of Medicine Weill Medical, College of Cornell University, 1300 York Avenue, Box 41, New York, NY 10021, USA
Medical Immunology 2002, 1:1 doi:10.1186/1476-9433-1-1
Published: 30 September 2002First paragraph (this article has no abstract)
This new journal, Medical Immunology, was conceived to fill the large divide between the science of basic immunology and the application of this scientific knowledge to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases of the immune system. Why is there a gap between the basic science of immunology and the application of this science to medicine? The answers to this question are historical in large part, in that the immune system has only become recognized and defined within the last century. Moreover, the rate of accumulation of new information has accelerated markedly, with most of our present understanding acquired only within the past 20 years. Consequently, most of what we know about the immune system has only come into being within the professional lifetimes of the practicing medical community. Because of this recent explosion in knowledge, there simply has not been enough time for the translation to clinical medicine to occur.