Pathogenesis of Glomerulonephritis: from Chickens to Humans

asleep, but I think he explained that by saying his senior resident (myself) harassed him all night and did not let him get much sleep! And the father of us all is sitting up there: Ed Lewis, of course, hasn’t changed at all either. That was the origin of the group of three in which Kline and I began our subsequent careers in glomerular disease. We all began the trip that brings us together here today at Boston City Hospital in 1970, where I first met Ed, and Kline later joined the two of us. But from my own perspective – and I think because it is my own perspective, it becomes in part Kline’s perspective – the story actually goes back another 4 years to a patient. If you are in the physician scientist world, you find that many careerdetermining stories do go back to patients. We rarely start with interest in genes and molecules; we usually start with an interest in a patient, and I started my research career because of a patient. A patient walked into the University of California in San Francisco in 1966 with a history of coughing up blood, feeling very weak, becoming anemic and developing early renal failure with a very active urine sediment that had red cells, casts and other abnormalities. When that patient was admitted to the hospital, I was assigned as his intern, and a kidney biopsy was done. The biopsy revealed crescents in glomeruli, which have been central to many of the talks we have heard this morning and are central to Kline’s career ( fig. 2 ). Relevant to this story is that this biopsy was the first one ever examined by immunofluorescence microscopy Let me say again what I said last night, thank you so much, Mark, for putting this whole thing together. As Ron Falk just said, this has been somewhat of a Gordon conference on the current status of research in this area. We have heard some presentations today that are going to be seminal papers when they are published, and we are hearing them before they come out. So this is an event that truly lives up to the scientific standards of Kline Bolton and the Bolton years at UVA, and it is a great privilege to be part of it. When Mark first contacted me about this and said, ‘What do you want to talk about?’ I said, ‘I think somebody needs to tell the Bolton story: somebody needs to tell how he got from where he started to where he is now.’ I think that story is a compelling narrative from the perspective of almost anybody, a student, a young investigator, or even one of Kline’s colleagues who can look at it as a parallel track and admire it. So, I would like to review glomerulonephritis as Kline has contributed to it, going from the chicken and the mouse to man. So Mark has actually allowed me to use that title: Pathogenesis of Glomerulonephritis: from Chickens to Humans. Nobody has shown this picture of the house staff and faculty of the Harvard Medical Service at the old Boston City Hospital ( fig. 1 ). It takes us back to the first time (1970) that Kline and I were in the same place. I am sitting up there looking pretty much the same as I do now! Kline Bolton is here. You can appreciate that Kline is Published online: May 6, 2009