The strangest thing happened. There was an immune reaction. The spleen’s immune cells attacked. That alone wasn’t necessarily at odds with previous learning; after all, perhaps the immune cells had antibodies that recognized something foreign. But, quite oddly, the attack didn’t involve any B cells or T cells. The response was less specific than the targeted nature of B cell and T cell attacks. These “new” cells swarmed instantly in a kind of raw, generic manner that seemed more consistent with a knee-jerk attack than the specified, deliberate nature postulated by clonal selection theory.
