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Harden:  That's also when you started publishing. Your first paper in 1981 was in the prestigious Journal of Immunology, and it was followed fairly quickly by 13 more publications by 1985. These were highly technical studies, so would you tell me a bit about this work?

Auchincloss:  Everything we did while I was there turned out to be based on an incorrect hypothesis, but David Sachs ran an extraordinary laboratory. There was enormous productivity from everybody who was there. I benefited from the quality of people around me and the laboratory that I worked in. The fundamental thing that we were trying to understand was the T-cell receptor. Nobody knew quite what the T-cell receptor was at that point. We knew about B-cells and about antibodies, which were also the B cell receptors. We thought the T-cell receptor probably had something to do with antibodies, and therefore we were trying to immunize mice against what we thought would be the T-cell receptor in order to influence what their future immune repertoire would be. It turns out that the T-cell receptor has nothing to do with the B-cell receptor, and we were completely barking up the wrong tree. But at that time, people were very interested in that hypothesis, and some good journals took some of our papers that ended up, in the end, really disproving our fundamental hypothesis.

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