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| |Gray's||subject #274 1273| |The thymus of a full-term fetus,
exposed in situ.| Due to the large numbers of apoptotic
lymphocytes, the thymus was originally dismissed as a
"lymphocyte graveyard", without functional importance. The
importance of the thymus in the immune system was discovered by
Jacques Miller, by surgically removing the thymus from three day
old mice, and observing the subsequent deficiency in a
lymphocyte population, subsequently named T cells after the
organ of their origin.  Recently advances in immunology have
allowed the fine dissection of the function of the thymus in T
cell maturation. In the two thymic lobes, lymphocyte precursors
from the bone-marrow become thymocytes, and subsequently mature
into T cells. Once mature, T cells emigrate from the thymus and
constitute the peripheral T cell repertoire responsible for
directing many facets of the adaptive immune sy