Greetings
I cannot pinpoint how this concept started, but I have some idea of the
vimentin control propagated...

In 1990, "immuno guru" Hector Battifora presented a short course at the
International Academy of Pathology (IAP) in Boston.  Looking at the hand out
now, I can see that the course covered most all aspects of
immunohistochemistry, from start to finish.  

One topic was "controlling for antigen loss due to fixation."  Battifora
describes that he believed that it was useful to select an epitope that "is
abundantly expressed by most tissues and that is partially sensitive to the
fixative to act as an internal reporter molecule."  For this purpose his lab
selected vimentin.  After evaluating several antibodies, he described
selecting an antibody distributed by DAKO.  At that time, that was clone V9.

IN the early 90's, using this information, another antibody supplier with
the same clone presented workshops and distributing literature promoting
this idea of the vimentin as a fixation control.  This coincided with the
publication (Shi, et al, 1991) that this loss of antigenicity (or vimentin
staining) could be recovered by boiling the tissue sections.

Seeing as that information is old, I am curious to hear if better reporter
molecules have been determined.  Or why 3B4 is used instead of V9?

Mark V. Corl
Lab Vision - NeoMarkers