Hot Spots in Immunology

• Vaccination
  Due to a falsified study published by an unscrupulous doctor, vaccination has become the public scapegoat for Autism. A huge amount of research has been done to verify this connection. Each new study has found the original claim of vaccines causing Autism to be false, but the public belief still exists. Many parents have gone to great lengths to prevent the vaccination of their children. The nation has recently been suffering from outbreaks of Measles, a virus that can be easily be kept out of the population when the majority of citizens are vaccinated. The reported cases and death toll of this outbreak are climbing fast. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/13/health/measles-update-cdc-800-cases/index.html

• Balancing Potency and Side Effects in Cancer Immunotherapies
  Immunotherapy is a promising new option of cancer treatment. However, cancer
  immunotherapies often come with the unintended side effects of severe systemic inflammation known as cytokine release syndrome (patients develop flu-like symptoms and are sometimes endangered by high fevers) and high neurotoxicity (toxins capable of negatively affecting the brain and nerves accumulate in the body, causing problems). A huge difficulty faced by Immunologists is experimentally proving working immunotherapies in human models. Ethically, it's not okay to test a therapy with potentially dangerous side-effects on human patients until hundreds of mice have been tested and the treatment has been cleared for clinical trials, which takes years. Breakthroughs are being made (some of the latest news: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/a-revised-car-t-for-lymphoma-has-fewer-side-effects-65775), but we still have a long way to go until cancer immunotherapy becomes widely available to the public.

• Reconciling Religion and Science
  Though this final hot spot is common across scientific disciplines and therefore not unique to immunology, it is a compelling undercurrent that effects how people view and/or interact with science. This hot spot has many facets. One facet is how people use their religion to approach (or run away from) science. With so much information circulating around the internet and the popularity of inflammatory news, there is often a disconnect between what's actually going on and what the public thinks is going on. For example, many people who oppose abortion for religious and moral reasons are firmly against stem cell research due to the grotesque and moving descriptions provided by pro-life media. They are understandably disturbed by the notion of using the tissue of aborted fetuses to conduct stem cell research. However, stem cell research tends to be demonized via over-generalization; much stem cell research is conducted using stem cells from umbilical cords donated by mothers after they give birth to healthy babies. It seems that this misconception has mostly been cleared up by responsible media (an excellent article: https://www.lifeissues.org/2000/11/im-pro-life-oppose-embryonic-stem-cell-research/), but it takes a while for the responsible media to break through the sensationalism enough to have a voice and misconceptions remain.
  Two more facets are more personal: how religious scientists reconcile their own beliefs with science, and how religion influences the interaction of scientists who carry different sets of beliefs.