Perspective in The Journal

(1). The paper was solicited by the late Ira Goldstein, a pioneer in the field of leukocyte biology, and was written with the belief that the discovery of IL-8, which insiders liked to call NAP-1 (for neutrophil activating protein-1), was a big step toward the understanding of neutro-phil recruitment. What we wrote is still largely valid, but our Perspective was short-sighted as we did not expect the number and variety of chemokines to grow so much so fast. The fact that the chemokine superfamily today comprises more than 30 members indicates by itself that these proteins are important in biology and pathology. At least seven CXC chemokines, in-cluding IL-8, are active on neutrophils and share the receptors. For several CC chemokines, overlapping activities on mono-cytes, lymphocytes, basophils, and eosinophils have been de-scribed (2), and additional CC chemokines are in the process of being characterized. The high number of related species is unusual even in the cytokine field, and the redundancy of the chemokine system is in danger of confusing and boring everybody. Why an editorial on eotaxin, then? The remarkable feature of eotaxin is its apparent selectivity for eosinophil leukocytes. Eotaxin was discovered in 1993 by T.J. Williams and col-leagues following a classical protocol. In a model of allergic lung inflammation of the guinea pig they found that the fluid recovered by bronchoalveolar lavage induced the local accu-mulation of eosinophils when injected into the skin. Since the recruitment was selective it was worth looking for the attrac-tant which was purified and shown to represent a new CC chemokine and was fittingly called eotaxin (3, 4). A homolo-gous chemokine with chemotactic activity for eosinophils was later described in mice (5). The article by Ponath and col-leagues in this issue o