Horror autotoxicus

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Horror autotoxicus , in German about "fear of self-destruction" or "fear of self-poisoning", was the name of a principle postulated by the German immunologist Paul Ehrlich at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. According to this theory advocated by him, the body's immune defense would always only be directed against structures foreign to the body. According to this view, an immune response against the body's own tissue (autoimmunization) is fundamentally not possible, as it would have catastrophic consequences and would be incompatible with life. Since Ehrlich was a supporter of the so-called humoral immunology in the immunological research of the time, according to which the immune defense is based on antitoxins present in the blood serum , the theory of horror autotoxicus meant the assumption that antitoxins did not occur against the body's own structures.

Historical meaning

Ehrlich relativized his views on the horror autotoxicus in later works to the effect that antitoxins directed against one's own body would be possible, but would not have a disease-causing function due to certain protective mechanisms of the body. A series of discoveries subsequently showed that immune reactions directed against one's own body occur under certain circumstances and that these lead to defined clinical pictures, which are referred to as autoimmune diseases . The theory of horror autotoxicus as an invariably applicable principle was thus refuted around 50 years after it was formulated. Due to Ehrlich's reputation within the research community, it made research into autoimmune diseases difficult for decades. In addition, it contributed significantly to the reorientation of immunology from a clinically oriented discipline to a science dominated primarily by biochemical research, which began around 1910. It was not until around the 1950s that the relevance of medical aspects within immunology increased again.

The term horror autotoxicus is often mistakenly equated with autoimmune reactions or presented as Ehrlich's predictive description of autoimmunity. In contrast to this, in the historical context of Ehrlich's work, it does not describe autoimmunological processes themselves, but the assumption of the body's own protection, through which such reactions are generally not possible. For such mechanisms that prevent autoimmunity under physiological conditions , the term self-tolerance , coined by Frank Macfarlane Burnet in the late 1950s, is used in current medical or biological parlance .

literature

  • Arthur M. Silverstein: Autoimmunity versus horror autotoxicus: The Struggle for Recognition. In: Nature Immunology . 2/2001. Nature Publishing Group, pp. 279-281, ISSN  1529-2908
  • Arthur M. Silverstein: Horror autotoxicus, Autoimmunity, and Immunoregulation: The Early History. In: Transfusion Medicine and Hemotherapy. 32/2005. Karger, pp. 296-302, ISSN  1660-3796
  • Arthur M. Silverstein: A History of Immunology. Academic Press Inc., San Diego 1989, ISBN 0-12-643770-X , pp. 160-189
  • Horror autotoxicus. In: Robert Alan Lewis: Lewis' Dictionary of Toxicology. CRC Press, Boca Raton 1998, ISBN 1-56-670223-2 , p. 570
  • Raymond W. Beck: A Chronology of Microbiology in Historical Context. ASM Press, Washington, DC 2000, ISBN 1-55-581193-0 , p. 134
  • Horror autotoxicus (historical). In: Julius M. Cruse, Robert E. Lewis: Illustrated Dictionary of Immunology. CRC Press, Boca Raton 2003, ISBN 0-84-931935-8 , p. 291