Life Sciences Commons^™

The Riddle Of The Fetal Allograft, Rachel Tepper

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

The immunological paradox of nurturing a fetus with paternal antigens poses some perplexing questions. Peter Medawar, an immunologist, asked at a lecture, “How does the pregnant mother contrive to nourish within itself, for many weeks or months, a fetus that is an antigenically foreign body?” Researchers have since then struggled to answer this question. The research on this topic has led to a few general hypotheses that try to explain this phenomenon. The downregulation of T cells toward paternal alloantigens is an accepted hypothesis. Another hypothesis discusses the significance of the decidua and its ability to impair dendritic cells, which …