Blood groups in man / by R.R. Race and Ruth Sanger.

  • R.R. Race
Date:
1954
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Blood groups in man / by R.R. Race and Ruth Sanger. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ‘ (a) The early presence of A antigen has presumably inhibited the production of anti-Æ Mrs. McK. is group O and her serum con tains anti-B, but there is no detectable anti-A : it has been looked for by methods using saline, albumin, anti-human globulin, trypsin, and papain. If anti-A were being produced by Mrs. McK. and promptly adsorbed, the only tissue capable of such adsorption would be her A x cells, but these cannot be shown to be either sensitized or blocked. [The presence, early in embryonic life, of foreign antigen is known to prevent subsequent production of antibodies to this antigen; Billingham, Brent and Medawar 28 call this phenomenon ‘actively acquired tolerance.’] ‘ (b) Secretion of A antigen in saliva clearly must depend on the presence in the genotype of the A gene as well as the secretor gene, for the secretor gene of Mrs. McK. cannot command the secretion of A present only in her circulation. ‘(c) Mrs. McK. is feminine in appearance and has had one child: she is clearly not a freemartin. Nevertheless, now that it is estab lished that there can be prenatal communication between the circulations of dissimilar human twins, it may be worth recording the proportion of twins among people suffering from infertility and from abnormal sexual development.’ The blood groups that are now used, or could now be used, in legal work The use of any of the blood groups in legal work is dependent on the antisera being available, and should be dependent on the existence of an expert constantly engaged in such work. The ABO groups There is no difficulty about the supply of antiserum. The manner of inheritance is known beyond any doubt, and the antigens A and B are sufficiently developed at birth to be recog nizable with certainty. The characters A and B meet the other necessities we have men tioned, those of stability in face of climate, disease and age, and of independence of the rest of the environment and of all the genetic background save the two responsible genes. The children that can arise from the various ABO matings are shown in Table ioo. Provided there were no technical errors any
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