Fernando Martinez: seeking to solve the puzzle of asthma.

摘要

One of Fernando Martinez's earliest and strongest memories is watching his mother have asthma attacks. "I remember vividly her gasping for air and the anguish of our whole house that she had these serious attacks", says Martinez. This was probably the "number one motivation", he says, for devoting his career to studying asthma. And he says he is confident that strategies for preventing and curing asthma will be developed in his lifetime.Martinez, now director of the Respiratory Sciences Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ, USA, has made major contributions to understanding asthma as an excessive immune response triggered by a mix of genetic susceptibility and environmental exposure. He backs the "hygiene hypothesis", which suggests that asthma incidence has skyrocketed in the developed world because we are no longer exposed to microbes that used to train our immune systems "the way that light trains the eye and sound trains the ear", Martinez explains.