THE BATTLE AGAINST ANTIBIOTIC-RESISTANT INFECTIONS: Some plants and creatures tolerate infections better than others. Some human beings tolerate infections better than others. Biologists David Schneider and Janelle Ayres thought understanding “toleration” could lead to new ways of stopping infections.

…the idea immediately caught the eye of one of the nation’s most renowned and creative immunologists: Ruslan Medzhitov, who has scooped up nearly every recent major prize for biology and who many think was unfairly overlooked for the 2011 Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of Toll-like receptors, pattern recognition molecules key to the immune system.

Medzhitov had been frustrated for years by a finding he could not explain. In experiment after experiment, he noted that infected animals differed wildly in their survival rates — and it didn’t seem to matter how many pathogens or disease-causing microbes they carried. If killing microbes was all that mattered, he said, this differential survival of infected animals made no sense at all.

“All the standard thinking about how the immune system works,” he said, “was clearly inefficient.”

So when he first read papers by Ayres and Schneider — and work by Andrew Read and Lars Raberg at Penn State — he became convinced that tolerance was the key issue immunologists had long overlooked.

“I was immediately hooked on the idea,” he said. “It sounded so logical and biologically satisfying.”

More:

…a 19th-century paper on plants that remained healthy despite being infected with leaf rust that helped inform Ayre’s thinking on tolerance. “It had never been looked at in animals, never described in animals,” she said, speaking with her characteristic rapid-fire enthusiasm. “That’s why you should always read papers outside your bubble.”

(She’s also fascinated with Typhoid Mary, the chef who sickened dozens and killed three in the early 1900s in New York, but somehow tolerated her own infection.)

Someone tell Glenn that perhaps things are moving faster.