Somatic Mutation and Autoimmunity

Upon reading Christopher Goodnow's recent Review article in Cell, which emphasized the overlapping role of somatic mutation in autoimmunity and cancer (Goodnow, 2007), I was reminded of a graduate lecture course given by Professor Roderick MacLeod in 1995 at the University of Illinois. While introducing F.M. Burnet's clonal selection theory to our small class, Professor MacLeod mentioned Burnet's idea that germline and somatic mutations provide the inherited and stochastic mechanisms that disrupt tolerance and result in autoimmunity.