French Immunology: from Louis Pasteur to present, always driving forward

The science of immunology emerged in the last part of the 19th and the first of the 20th century with its roots in the interconnected efforts of physics, chemistry and microbiology. In particular, microbiology with its study of microorganisms was one of the main investigative preoccupations of those considered to be the main founders of immunology, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Ilya Ilich Metchnikoff, Paul Ehrlich and Jules Bordet. However, it was not until the mid 20th century that modern immunology emerged with the clonal selection theory by Frank Macfarlane Burnet, the discoveries of interferon by Alick Isaacs and Jean Lindenmann, human leukocyte antigens by Jean Dausset and Jon van Rood and antibody structure by Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter. This coincided with the birth of many European immunology societies, the Société Française d’Immunologie (SFI) included. It was created in 1966 on the initiative of Pierre Grabar, the inventor of the immune-electrophoresis technique, who also became SFI’s first president (Table 1). In keeping with the history of immunology, the SFI was created as a