One of my earliest memories.

Fighting with my pediatrician, Sid Isaacson.  Yelling at him that it was illegal to cut one’s body intentionally.  It was like getting a tattoo.

That didn’t stop the ‘sadist’.  He slashed twelve cuts in each arm, and added a drop of liquid to each slit.

That was the first time. Why only once?  Because within a few minutes, my arms were as inflated as balloons.  There was no way to discern if I were allergic to 24 items or highly allergic to just a few.

After waiting an hour, he got to practice his sadism yet again.  This time with only 8 slits on the arm.  And- the same results.

Had I learned that great aphorism- that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results- by the age of 5, I would have used it on Sid.

Instead, Sid decided I needed to go to a specialist to discern what allergies I had.  About six months later, I was the proud owner of a 50+ page monograph (with those sliding tabs and clear plastic cover) detailing some 10,000 items to which I was allergic.  It was much easier to remember that I could enjoy chocolate, tuna fish, apples, pineapples, and strawberries without any reaction.

That was the state of allergy treatment (and biweekly shots) back in the mid-1950s.

But, that changed, thanks to research at National Jewish Health Hospital (then called the Children’s Asthma Research Institute) and Dr. Kimishige Ishizaka.  (This institution has been on my tzedaka [charity] list for decades.)

Dr. Ishizaka is the person who identified that it was an antibody that caused me to wheeze, to stop breathing, to break out in rashes when confronted with something on my list.  (I’m sure you guessed by now that wheezing and difficult breathing was the norm- since I was allergic to so many different things that were impossible to avoid.)

Dr. Ishizaka and his wife (both immunologists) discerned that a relatively rare antibody, IgE (Immunoglobulin E), was the trigger for these inflammatory responses.   Oh, wait- he not only determined the IgE was the trigger- but how the antibody functioned in the body.

(Oh, yeah.  For those of you used to “sterile research procedures”.  Just like the kind of testing and development I did for decades, Ishizaka manifested this discovery because he injected himself with the test material, developed a rash that lasted a week or so, and, in so doing, learned first hand about the inflammatory response.  This practice is frowned upon nowadays.  I still practice it, though.)

For those of you who studied enzymes (in biology), it won’t be surprising that this antibody operates similarly.  Using a lock-and-key binding factor, connecting one end of the antibody to the offending substance- while the other end is connected to a mast cell (a type of white blood cell, critical to immune responses).    Once this bonding is complete, histamines are secreted from the mast cell (along with another compound).

The problem is that for folks like me, the surplus of IgE stimulates way too much histamine release. Which means our capillaries dilate, triggering other immune responses.  (For those with lesser allergies, it may be sneezing; in my case, it was airway restrictions.)

Ishizaka’s  initial results were published in two articles in the Journal of Immunology, way back in 1966.  (Article 1) (Article 2.)  Shortly after this was published, the Ishizakas relocated to Johns Hopkins, where they stayed until 1989, when Ishizaka became the scientific director of the newly formed La Jolla Institute.

Ishizaka retired in 1996 and moved to his wife’s hometown in Japan.  But, he still dabbled in the science.  He was one of the proponents of the “hygiene hypothesis”- which believes that our desire to protect  infants from exposure to the elements renders them more susceptible to allergens. (In other words, make sure your infants and toddlers are exposed to a wide range of potentially allergic items, that way they can develop a tolerance and diminished immune response when exposed to them in the future.)   The corollary to that is air conditioning, heating, and other environmental factors prevailing in developed countries allow for an increase in the number of allergic patients and allergies- as he stipulated in 2014, when interviewed for the monograph, “History of Allergy”.

Dr. Ishizaka died last month at the age of 92.  But, his discoveries and explanations live on.