ABSTRACT
In a Czech fairy tale a smart mountaineer woman is charged by a man of power to come to see him “neither in the day nor at night, neither naked nor dressed, neither on foot nor riding”. The clever girl solves the problem by coming at dawn, with a loosely woven sack on her body, with one shoe and one sock on her feet, sitting on a goat with her legs on the ground. The nude mutant may have been here since 1962, or indeed since 1850, when two hairless mice died in a zoologist’s grape vase and the third one escaped. In any case, the nude mouse has been a tool for an impressive amount of work on the nature of T cells and on the interaction of T cells with MHC class I and class II antigens.
