I do not like vaccinations. I wonder if they are connected to the autism and diabetes epidemics, even attention-deficit disorders. I do vaccinate my children, just begrudgingly. Yet if there ever was a vaccination against type 1 diabetes, I would be first in line.

Researchers in France and Germany have demonstrated you can treat a type 1 diabetic mouse with a vaccination. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system's T cells cannot distinguish between "non-self" and "self", attacking cells of the pancreas that produce insulin.

Previously, Drs. Falk and Rotzschke of the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), blocked the misdirected immune system by vaccinating mice with modified structures of the same organ targeted by the defective T cell immune response. Antigens are structures which activate a body's immune system, and the mice were protected from type 1 diabetes through the body's own antigens linked together in a repetive chain of identical copies. But the researchers did not understand how this protective string of antigens worked.