It isn't often that an entire field of medical science gets turned on its head. But it is becoming clear that immunology is undergoing a big rethink thanks to the discovery that antibodies, which combat viruses, work not just outside cells but inside them as well. The star of this new view is a protein molecule called TRIM21.

Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that the body fights off infection in two separate ways. First is the adaptive immune system, which works outside the cell. It generates antibodies to intercept specific invaders, locking onto them like a tracking missile and preventing them from entering the cell. A second line of defense, the innate immune system, operates within the cell; it is like an expansive air-defense network, blasting away at all invaders.

Three years ago work by Leo James, William McEwan and their colleagues at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge revealed that this understanding was incomplete. They found that the neutralization of adenoviruses (common viruses causing colds and other infections) by antibodies was happening mainly inside the cell, not outside, and by an unexpected mechanism.

This mechanism opens a whole new path to curing viral infections, and autoimmune diseases like lupus.

This was written the day of the passing of President Ronald Reagan on June 5, 2004.  We run it every year in honor of the greatest American of the 20^th century.

In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at UCLA. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican. Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left-wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading.

The UCLA Student Union was packed, SRO. There was a buzz that Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony and I sat expectantly in the audience. As Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced.

Then he caught us by surprise.

Here I am in Ireland and the last thing in the world I am looking forward to is flying through London Heathrow to get back home. 

British intel was tipped off by some good guys inserted by Parvez Musharaff into ISI (Pakistan intel) about a Moslem terrorist plot to blow up airliners flying out of Heathrow to America.  So the security is a nightmare - for everyone, not just Moslems.

Thus I was thrilled to hear about The Heroes of Malaga - British passengers on a Monarch Airlines flight from Malaga, Spain to Manchester, England on August 16 who refused to fly until two Moslems were taken off the plane.

The liberal British media was horrified.  The London Daily Mail ran a story entitled Asian students' shock at ejection from jet by passenger mutiny.  It is forbidden, you see, to refer to Moslems as such in the British media.  The accepted code word is "Asian" - as if they were Chinese or Japanese, anything but Moslem.

The "Asians" complained bitterly they were "humiliated."  So I have a modest proposal to end their humiliation, and increase airport security as well.

To borrow the climactic line from Easy Rider, "We blew it." Or, to be fully accurate, President Obama blew an unprecedented chance to aid Syria's then-moderate opposition back in 2011.

We could have helped end the monstrous Assad regime, gaining good will and practical advantage in a hopeful new state.

Now it's too late. And Obama may be ready to act at last. The result could be disastrous.

Strategy isn't only about doing the right thing, but about doing the right thing at the right time. Doing what appears to be the "right thing" too late often makes things worse.

How did the window for aiding the Syrian rebels close?