Despite the centrality of the innate immune response, or perhaps because of its centrality, innate immunity has proven difficult to manipulate medically. But, unknowingly, perhaps, we have been playing with innate immunity for longer than a century. This age-old instance of manipulating innate immunity is vaccination—although, of course, when vaccines were first invented, the vocabulary of innate immunity did not exist, nor was the mechanism of protection known. Even the word vaccine would be coined centuries after vaccination itself was being practiced widely across China, India, and the Arab
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