How studying chicken butts cracked the inner workings of our immune system.

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A Golden Goose award just recognized how poultry enhanced our understanding of B and T cells.

Yes, these butts helped solve a medical mystery.
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▼ Children were dying, and pediatrician Max Cooper couldn’t understand why. They had plenty of plasma cells, which he knew produced antibodies, but his patients who were suffering from a rare hereditary disease called Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome were still failing to fight off simple herpes infections. By the early 1960’s, we had invented lasersand video games, but were still missing a vital piece of understanding about how our bodies recognize, attack, and remember foreign invaders.
Cooper didn’t know it at the time, but the key to cracking the puzzle had already been published years before, to little fanfare, in the journal of Poultry Science. “That journal changed the world, says Gregg Silverman, a pathologist at the NYU Langone Health. Now, more than sixty years later, the research has won a Golden Goose award for its unlikely contribution to modern medicine.
The author, Bruce Glick, never set out to upend immunology. As a graduate student studying poultry science at Ohio State University in the mid-1950’s, he just really liked chickens. Or more specifically, a curious organ in their rear known as the bursa of Fabricius, after the 15th-century Italian anatomist who first described it. Thinking it might affect development, he surgically removed the organ from dozens of chicks, but couldn’t detect any changes as they grew. The bursa’s function remained a mystery.
Glick’s story might have ended there, had chickens not been such a hot commodity at Ohio State. Shortly after his experiment, Glick’s colleague Timothy Chang borrowed a few for a demonstration in his immunology course. He intended to show his students how injecting them with vaccines would produce defensive proteins known as antibodies, but a few weeks later the chickens embarrassed Chang when most of their blood tests returned negative results. No immunity.
“He came back and said, ‘you've spoiled my demo. Your chickens didn't make antibodies,’” Cooper says.
Checking his notes, Glick realized that the few chickens who had developed immunity were the ones that happened to have their bursas intact, and immediately guessed that the organ must make antibodies in young chicks. “Glick put two and two together,” says Cooper. “They went back and repeated the experiment, and found that it correlated exactly with bursectomy.”
The message was clear: No bursa, no antibodies. Glick took his discovery straight to the magazineScience, but the editors rejected it for failing to explain the mechanism behind the phenomenon. Not one to brood, Glick published the bursa  breakthroughinPoultry Sciencein 1956, where it promptly began to gather dust. (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, read the full note here: Source