The Summerlin Phenomenon

To the Editor.—  A paper on the application of solid medium method in allogenic transplantation, by A.H. Sidiqui and colleagues of the University of Amsterdam, was presented at the International Symposium on Wound Healing in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in April 1974 and appears to be of relevance to the Sloan-Kettering affair (229:1391, 1974).These authors supported the thesis that allogenic skin undergoes antigenic attenuation during culture in vitro. Because of their impression that the conventional liquid culture medium leads to deterioration of the physical quality of the graft, they devised a solid (agar) culture medium and showed that while normal allogenic mouse skin, when grafted onto previously sensitized mice, was promptly rejected, allografts that had been first cultured for six weeks in the new solid medium were accepted when similarly transplanted to the sensitized mice. This phenomenon was limited to allografts and was not true of xenografts of similarly treated