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Mehdi Tavassoli, MD; William H. Crosby, MD

JAMA. 1990;264(17):2290.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

The Reed-Sternberg cell is highly characteristic of, but not unique to, Hodgkin's disease. Morphologically, it is usually a binucleate giant cell with prominent nucleoli often referred to as "owl eyes." The cell, presumably, is the malignant cell of Hodgkin's disease, the presumption based on clonal aneuploidy, growth characteristics in tissue culture, and heterotransplantability into athymic "nude" mice. The recent demonstration of the Epstein-Barr viral genome in this cell has lent support to a long-standing suspicion that the virus may play a causative role in Hodgkin's disease.¹

Yet the Reed-Sternberg cell continues to bewilder pathologists and investigators alike. Despite sophisticated techniques for cell identification, its lineage is debated: is it lymphocyte or is it macrophage? Its demonstration in other reticuloendothelial diseases casts a veil of uncertainty across its preeminence as a pathognomonic diagnostic feature of Hodgkin's disease. The cell surely manages to confuse us. Those nucleoli do more than look . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Veterans Administration Hospital Jackson, Miss; Chapman Cancer Center Joplin, Mo

Footnotes
Edited by Roxanne K. Young, Associate Editor.

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