ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, the introduction of regulatory molecules which act upon the human immune system-the cytokines (interferons, and then interleukins)—into cancer therapy was presented as a major innovation in this domain. Thanks to genetic engineering methods, regulatory molecules produced by the body could be manufactured by industry and used as research materials and as drugs.1 The availability of these purified regulatory substances, some experts proposed, finally brought the domain of immunotherapy of cancer into the realm of exact science. Thus in 1983, Robert Oldham, then the director of the Biological Response Modifiers Program of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), linked the increasing molecularization of this domain-or to be more precise the increasing availability of biological agents which modulate immune responses-with hopes of a therapeutic breakthrough in the cancer clinics: “The revolution in molecular biology, the advent of computers and the improvement in hybridoma technology have combined to enable the scientists to produce the highly purified reagents necessary to begin to ask rather specific questions about immunological mechanisms involved in cancer growth, metastasis and therapy” (Oldham and Smalley, 1983, p. 3).
