ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the eosinophil granule proteins had been isolated and defined at the Mayo Clinic and in Sweden, and the broad spectrum of activities of eosinophils in disease had begun to be apparent. Although Paul Ehrlich is rightly credited with defining the eosinophil in 1879, we should not forget that several others before him had seen eosinophils or their products in tissues and blood. As Basten has both Australian and British parentage, it was fitting that Australian and British teams, especially Colin Sanderson’s group, should subsequently isolate and clone interleukin-5 (IL-5) in 1987. The cloning of the IL-5 receptor in Japan, where IL-5 had also been cloned and sequenced as a B-cell interleukin, was another significant milestone whose implications in disease are still being unraveled. The presence of IL-5 mRNA in unstimulated human bone marrow mononuclear cells shown using a semiquantitative polymerase chain reaction assay with β-actin mRNA as an internal standard.
