Integrated immunology in Colorado

Establishment of the Rocky Mountain region as a hub forimmunology research began in the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries with the arrival of tuberculosis patients sentfor ‘‘clean air and sunshine’’ therapy. Gerald Webb, a pupilof Sir Almroth Wright—an early developer of typhoidvaccines and a strong proponent of immunization—movedto Colorado to be with his wife who had contractedtuberculosis and to complete his medical education at theUniversity of Denver. In June 1913, a small group ofdoctors from the United States and Canada, who hadtrained in London with Wright, met to consider thefounding of a society. Wright had famously said that ‘‘thephysician of the future will be an immunisator.’’ Webb,who had become a clinician–immunologist in ColoradoSprings, insisted that ‘‘immunologist’’ was a more inclu-sive term. Thus, Webb protected us from celebrating the100th birthday of the American Association of Immuni-sators in 2013. He was elected the ﬁrst President of theAAI, a reﬂection of the prominence of the Colorado groupeven in the early history of American immunology [1].Many of the Colorado hospitals and research institutesbegan as tuberculosis sanatoria. The physicians who caredfor tuberculosis patients were impressed with how promi-nent a role the immune response played in both the controland the symptomatology of the disease. With the advent ofstreptomycin in the 1940s, the need for specialized sana-toria waned, and some of them were converted into hos-pitals for the treatment of another prominent pulmonaryimmunologic disease, asthma. National Jewish Hospital forConsumptives, the precursor of National Jewish Health,was founded in 1899. The Denver Sheltering Home forJewish Children, the precursor of the National AsthmaCenter, was established in 1907 as a home for the childrenof tuberculosis patients. These two sites merged in 1978and continue to lead in respiratory care and immunologyresearch today. This was where Kimishige and TerukoIshizaka identiﬁed IgE as the antibody isotype that medi-ates allergy in 1966 [2]. In that same year, Henry Claman atthe University of Colorado School of Medicine observedthe synergistic interaction between thymocytes and bonemarrow cells for the production of antibody, thus identi-fying for the ﬁrst time the helper T cell and T-B collabo-ration [3].Both the Ishizakas and Claman were recruited to Col-orado by David Talmage, who was credited as the man whobrought modern immunology to Denver; he formulatedwhat became known as the clonal selection theory in 1957[4, 5]. Talmage arrived at the University of Colorado in1959. He encouraged the growth of immunology at all ofCU’s afﬁliated institutions, and began the process wherebynew recruits in these institutions would also be appointedas regular CU faculty. This policy of inclusiveness led toremarkable growth of the Denver immunology group inseveral locations, and the eventual separation of the dis-cipline from the Department of Microbiology and the for-mation of the Integrated Department of Immunology in1993. Kathryn Haskins was the founding interim Depart-ment Chair and John Cambier became its ﬁrst permanentChair in 1999. They led us to many signiﬁcant