A review of the article by Ulmer, et al., “Heterologous Protection Against Influenza by Injection of DNA Encoding a Viral Protein”.
This paper examines the article by Ulmer, et al. (1993), entitled “Heterologous Protection Against Influenza by Injection of DNA Encoding a Viral Protein”, which was published in the prestigious journal, “Science”. It discusses how the main aim of the article was to test whether immunity to influenza A could be conferred on mice cells through injecting a plasmid containing a gene for influenza A virus. The paper is divided into four sections: an introduction, which outlines what was generally known in this field prior to the work of Ulmer, et al.; a methods section, which summarizes the main methods used for each of the separate experiments performed by Ulmer, et al.; a results section, which summarizes the meaning of each set of results from Ulmer, et al. and a critique, which discusses the evidence presented in Ulmer, et al..
“Prior to the paper by Ulmer et al. (1993), it was revealed by Wolff et al. (1990) that the muscles of living mice could be made to produce foreign proteins if injected with naked genes; this had huge implications for the production of vaccines, which rely on foreign proteins to prime the immune system to recognize and attack foreign proteins (Cohen, 1993). These naked genes, which were introduced through plasmids, were shown by Wolff et al. (1990) to perform normally epistomally, and did not replicate within the host cells (Ulmer et al., 1993). ”