Introduction

The invitation to prepare a foreword to “Liver Immunology Second Edition” is indeed an honor, given the successes of the first two editions of the book. The young and exuberant science of immunology, having just passed its first centennial and undergone detachment from microbiology in the 1950s, has enjoyed accelerating progress, at the laboratory and medical levels. Selection of the most influential advances in immunology in the “modern” era (post-1940s) is of course subjective, but would span topics as diverse as self-recognition to the immunological role of the intestinal microbiota. My list of the more significant advances is shown in Table 1.1.