epitopes of the first infection and the steady state of the host's immune cell population), which would explain why there is a variable period, which differs greatly between individual patients, between HIV infection and the onset of AIDS. It also suggests that conventional vaccines are unlikely to be successful, since they would not prevent the auto-immune reaction. In fact such vaccines may do more harm in certain cases, since if the original infection comes from a source with a "mature" infection, those virions will have a high affinity for anti-HIV T helper cells (see above), and so increasing the anti-HIV population via vaccination only serves to provide the virus with more easy targets. An HIV vaccine concept based on immune network theory A hypothetical HIV vaccine concept based on immune network theory has been described. The vaccine concept was based on a network theory resolution of the Oudin-Cazenave paradox. This is a phenomenon that makes no sense in the context of clonal selection, without taking idiotypic network interactions into account. The vaccine concept comprised complexes of an anti-anti-HIV antibody and an HIV antigen, and was designed to induce the production of broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies. A suitable anti-anti-HIV antibody envisaged for use in this vaccine is the monoclonal antibody 1F7, which was discovered by Sybille Muller and Heinz Kohler and their colleagues. This monoclonal antibody binds to all of six well characterized broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies. A more general vaccine based on immune network theory A vaccine concept based on a more recent extension of immune network theory and also based on much more data has been described by Reginald Gorczynski and Geoffrey Hoffmann. The vaccine typically involves three immune systems, A, B and C that can be combined to make an exceptionally strong immune system in a treated vertebrate C. In mouse models the vaccine has been shown to be effective in the prevention of inflammatory bowel disease; the prevention of tumour growth and prevention of metastases in a transplantable breast cancer; and in the treatment of an allergy. The immune system of C is stimulated by a combination of A anti-B (antigen-specific) and B anti-anti-B (antiidiotypic) antibodies. The former stimulate anti-anti-B T cells and the latter stimulate anti-B T cells within C. Mutual selection ("co-selection") of the anti-B and anti-anti-B T cells takes the system to a new stable steady state in which there are elevated levels of