The unusual glycosylation patterns on cancer cells, which harbor carbohydrate structures that are rarely seen on healthy tissue, provide a tempting target for the design of anti-cancer vaccines for immunotherapy. Unfortunately, carbohydrates tend to be poor immunogens. Much of the work in the carbohydrate-based cancer vaccine field is focused on boosting the immune system's response to these antigens. Scientists have had moderate success in this endeavor with strategies that include adding T-cell epitopes to the antigens, incorporating adjuvants in the vaccine injection mixture or directly conjugated to the vaccine, and priming immune cells outside of the body and re-injecting them, but no breakthrough strategy has emerged. Despite all this effort, to date no carbohydrate-based cancer vaccine has won approval from the Food and Drug Administration, and only one peptide-based cancer vaccine has been approved.

Chapter 1 describes some of the strategies that have been pursued in the quest to develop effective cancer immunotherapies, particularly those based on carbohydrate antigens. Later in the chapter, I introduce a new strategy to break immune self-tolerance based on vaccines built from modified carbohydrate antigens, and discuss some of the precedent established by our laboratory and others that suggests the new strategy is viable. In Chapter 2, I describe the synthesis of a panel of four vaccine constructs based on the disaccharide sialyl Tn. Then, I discuss the immune response elicited against the vaccines in rabbits based on ELISA analysis of their polyclonal antisera.

This unusual Festschrift for Amos Funkenstein, introduced by Professor Robert Alter, was made possible through the collaborative efforts of the Townsend Center, the UC Berkeley Department of History, and the Koret Chair in Jewish Studies. Professor Funkenstein held the Koret Chair at the time of his death in November 1995. This volume contains four essays selected from a memorial conference held to honor the memory of Amos Funkenstein. The first essay, "The last German-Jewish Philosopher," by Professor David Biale of the Graduate Theological Union, celebrates the breadth of Funkenstein's achievements in his major published works. Biale contends that Funkenstein's work is as much a biography of God in Judaeo-Christian thinking as it is a record of the transformation from theology to secular reason in the modern period. In the second essay, UC Berkeley Classics Department Professor Anthony Long, who was teaching a Townsend Center Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar with Professor Funkenstein at the time of his death, discusses the themes of that seminar, and their connections with Funkenstein's unfinished study, The Disenchantment of Knowledge: Moments of Transition in the History of Western Epistemologies. Isaac Miller's "Reflections on Pedagogy in the Academy" provides a graduate student's perspective of working under Professor Funkenstein's direction, an experience Miller likens to a "complex hall of mirrors" where making ideas relevant to one-another produced a dynamic environment that was constantly engaged, inspiring, and full of surprises. Professor Steven J. Zipperstein of Stanford's History Department reminisces about his former teacher and colleague in much the same manner. "Genius and its Vicissitudes" recalls a professor who was both casual and regal and whose engagement with his material and his students led from intense discussion in the seminar room to late-hour chess playing.