An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

by Matt Richtel

This is an extraordinarily complex calling, given that life is a raucous festival, your body like a sprawling party, a chaotic and exuberant affair populated with a variety of cells. There are billions of them, tissue cells and blood cells, proteins and molecules and invading microbes.

Our body is a take-all-comers bash, a festival with open seating, coursing with every life-form that happens by—petty thieves and gangs; terrorists armed with nuclear suitcases; dumb drunk cousins and relatives; enemy agents cloaked as friends; and foes so unpredictable and alien that they seem as if beamed from another universe.

Fully 20 percent of the American population, or 50 million Americans, develops an autoimmune disorder. By some estimates, 75 percent are women, with conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)—each terrible, frustrating, debilitating, hard to diagnose.

The very idea that the body would attack itself was still relatively new. The pioneering immunologist Paul Ehrlich introduced the term horror autotoxicus right around 1900. Autoimmunity. The body attacking itself.

norepinephrine is one of two major neurotransmitters or hormones—a signal secreted from the nerve endings or the adrenal glands—that are released immediately as part of a fight-or-flight response.

I can still picture one night when I was lying in bed, breathing deeply, and I kept meditating. An hour, more than an hour. I felt my jaw go slack. I felt my body calm. I fell asleep. I woke up in the morning rested—genuinely rested. Feeling different than I had in a long, long time. I kept doing it. Many nights, it would take an hour or more, maybe two. Now that I have learned the science, I know I was shutting off my sympathetic immune system. I was short-circuiting the dangerous cycle that Dr. Irwin had described in which my central nervous system had dosed my body with adrenaline, further intensifying the fight-or-flight response, inflaming swelling and the immune system, leading to further adrenal responses.

“CTLA-4 is there to protect you from being killed by your immune system.”

“Chronic irritation and previous injuries are a precondition of tumorigenesis.” Werner gives talks in which she cites two other equally prescient quotes: “Tumor production is possible overhealing,”

What this adds up to is that the likelihood of getting cancer depends in large part on how often a person experiences injury or certain types of injury.

CTLA-4. That’s the molecule on T cells that helped dampen or kill an immune system response.

cytokine storm.

Xenophobia, blind nationalism and racism, is an autoimmune disorder. A culture, tone-deaf in its own defense, attacks so aggressively that it puts itself at serious risk.