ABSTRACT
It is intriguing to write for, and about, a population of researchers who are sometimes called ‘aliens’ by the classic immunologists. Nobody knows from where they came, but the point in time of their appearance can be traced to around the last decades of the twentieth century. They are still around, and some have proliferated. They are also called modellers, but they are fastidious about what they like to model. As it happened, most of these modellers developed their tools and formed their models aiming to understand aspects and parts of the immune response. They were eager to learn all they could about how immunity worked, and their immunologist friends were happy to tell them what they knew and what they believed. The picture that the aliens received was very ‘cellular’; individual cells developing, maturing, moving around, meeting and conversing with other kinds of lymphocytes, and fi nally producing incredible responses. This picture may have been slightly biased by the way the immunologists used to communicate: they thought that the best way to convey their knowledge to the aliens was to do it in the form of a fairy tale, perhaps because they just liked fairy tales or because they were all admirers of the character played by Francois Truffaut in the contemporary fi lm Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the man who tried to facilitate communication between inhabitants of different galaxies by using music.
