Encouraging news.
Story:
In a photo I often use in presentation slides of my work, I’m standing in nothing but my swim trunks and sunglasses, covered in mud up to my ears. Next to me is my long-time colleague Joe Trapani, in much the same state, with a raccoon-like pattern on his face where he has smeared the mud away. We’d just spent an hour lounging in the Israeli side of the Dead Sea, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world, full of rich mineral mud that attracted visitors for thousands of years. I explain to my audience that we’re grinning like fools in the photo in part because of the way we looked but also, perhaps, because we were feeling so clever for coming up with a new way to answer an old, nagging research question: Do cells of the immune system detect and kill cancerous cells?

We had just come from the 1993 EMBO Cell-Mediated Cytotoxicity meeting in Jerusalem where a Swiss group, led by Hans Hengartner, reported the phenotype of a knockout mouse lacking the ability to produce the pore-forming molecule, perforin. Released by the killer cells of the immune system, perforin damages target cells or pathogens by punching holes in their plasma membranes. I had worked on the transcriptional control of perforin during my postdoctoral studies at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Frederick, Md., in the late 1980s. Joe, then at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, had studied the perforin gene and attempted to make his own perforin knockout mouse. The two of us listened to the presentation with rapt attention, with the same thought: might this model system reveal a role for perforin in early cancer elimination by immune cells?
http://www.the-scientist.com/2009/11/1/36/1/