More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Matt Richtel
Read between
March 13 - March 28, 2020
Like an out-of-control police state, an unchecked immune system can grow so zealous that it turns as dangerous as any foreign disease. This is called autoimmunity.
Diabetes, the leading killer in the country, is caused by the immune system’s going to war against the pancreas.
Smoking tests the immune system like few human habits; the tiny nicks and cuts to the soft lung tissue don’t just create persistent injury but force cells to divide to replace the hurt tissue. Cell division heightens the possibility for malignancy, cancer. This is just simple math, and it can be deadly.
In millions of people, excessive immune response is its own chronic disease.
Just goes to show, you should be careful what you discover. Here are a few other bacteria you don’t want feeding off you: E. coli, salmonella, tetanus bacillus, staphylococci, and syphilis spirochetes.
Arguably, the most famous virus of our time is the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. It belongs to a special category called retroviruses.
Such is the case with malaria, a parasite that divides quickly in the blood, essentially overtaking a circulatory system.
Bacterium, virus, parasite.
So if a pathogen gets into the bloodstream, Whoosh! This can quickly become a condition called sepsis—infection in the blood—which can be deadly. A major role of the immune system is to keep infection out of our circulatory system.
the immune system can have a hard time discerning bad or mutated cells, ones that look much like us, which are mostly self, but part alien. If it can’t tell the difference or gets tricked in some other way by the cancer so that it ignores the usual signals that halt the division of malignant cells, what follows is uncontrolled and reckless growth that is disruptive to normal tissue architecture and function. The immune system can wind up protecting the malignancy.
Survival depends on knowing what is self and what is alien. The immune system must cope with three major challenges: the variability of bad actors, the central circulatory system that sends rivers of blood throughout our body in seconds, and the need to heal. And
If two people are a poor fit for bone marrow, the isoantigens in one will provoke an antibody response in the other, setting off a defensive attack.
Meanwhile, the progress and pace of the breakthroughs were accelerating. It was here that science would discover the levers and knobs to permit more precision health treatment, care, and counsel.
An individual’s elegant defense didn’t care simply about the infection; it cared about the infection when it attacked its own personal habitat.
The T cells first determine if you specifically have come under attack. The concept is called the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC—another
Studies have shown the MHC gene gives off a scent. The scent is used as a factor in how people choose their mates. If one person’s MHC is too similar to another’s, the MHC will act as a repellent. The scent of MHC that is sufficiently different will act as a magnet.
“Inflammation is—very generally speaking—the body’s immune system’s response to stimulus.”
Another example of an everyday inflammatory response is the one set off by the common cold. It often is caused by a rhinovirus, which makes a battleground of your nose.
The technical term for one cell eating another is phagocytosis. That word derives from the Greek word phageîn, which means to eat.
These macrophages derive from and are a subset of a broad group of immune cells known as monocytes.
Dr. Steinman and a collaborator surmised that these cells played a key role in the immune system, and then proved it. Through a series of experiments, they showed that these cells, when presented with a foreign cell or organism, could stimulate or induce a powerful response from T cells and B cells.
Dendritic cells function
treelike cells played a key role in presenting antigens to the immune system cells.
If an antigen were perceived as foreign, it would stimulate a heavy response, what is known as a mixed leukocyte reaction, or MLR, a major inflammation of T cells and B cells and other immune cells.
In fact, T cells and B cells, together known as lymphocytes, make up only as much as 40 percent of the white blood cells.
The monocytes comprise 5 percent, give or take. The biggest chunk is made up of cells known as neutrophils. They are both spies and assassins.
Composition of white blood cells incljde t and b cells, monocytes, and neutrophils
The journey of the neutrophils begins in the bone marrow, where the defenders are born and from which they make their way into the bloodstream and circulate.
In the Festival of Life, neutrophils are first responders.
In much smaller concentration in the body are two other defenders, the eosinophil (less than 5 percent of the white blood cell population) and the basophil (less than 2 percent).
National Institutes of Health. Not only that, he earned his way into a remarkable place and time: Building 10 at the NIH, a hall of truly great science, a Willy Wonka factory of experimentation and discovery.
Seeds of salvation for sufferers of cancer, AIDS, autoimmune diseases, flu, and other killers were planted in Building 10.
Famed plces of fresearch nddevelopment like bhilding 10; cape canaveral etc
but one that now appeared to have much broader function. Dr. Dinarello called it a leukocytic pyrogen—a fire starter born of the white blood cells, the leukocytes.
Henceforth, a leukocytic pyrogen would be known as an interleukin. Inter from a root for “means of communication.” Leuk from the Greek root for white, as in leukocyte (white blood cell).
Immunology became increasingly enamored with the idea that it might isolate and corral the messaging system. What made this notion so significant is that it entailed using a natural substance to fight disease. The alternative, building medicines around foreign substances, almost invariably provokes side effects because it stimulates interest from the immune system and causes inflammation. Or consider the horror of chemotherapy, in which terrible toxins attack tumors but at the cost of scorching self.
Your behavior is being modified—not by the virus directly, but by the response.
Behavior is induced not by the virus but by the response
Your immune system takes care of you partly by making you take care of yourself.
thymus wasn’t just a waste of space, or God’s throwaway line. The thymus makes T cells. The bone marrow is the origin of B Cells. They flow in the tunnels and vessels that make up the lymphatic system and congregate in lymph nodes and lymphatic tissue. These are like command centers, surveillance hubs where the firefighters are awaiting a call. The T cells, when alerted by dendritic cells, behave as soldiers and generals, spitting out cytokines; the B cells use antibodies to connect to antigens as if they are keys in search of a lock. Macrophages, neutrophils, and natural killer cells roam the
...more
The story of the immune system became the story of homeostasis—a state of harmony or stability.
None, arguably, was as significant as the discovery of the monoclonal antibody.
For the first time, scientists could isolate a cell with a particular antibody and make endless copies of it. In turn, this technology allowed researchers to begin to make distinctions between and among lots of different cell types with antibodies. This
For instance, if we knew what particular antibodies responded to particular pathogens, could we then figure out how the deadly diseases attacked or how the dance between self and alien took place?
Drugs built on monoclonal antibodies have become a dominant source of drugs in the early part of the twenty-first century. The annual market for these drugs is nearly $100 billion. They work by intensifying—or dulling, as the case may be—the performance of a particular antibody so that the body does a better job of attacking a life-threatening risk, like cancer, or, alternatively, dampening our elegant defenses so that the immune system doesn’t behave so aggressively and cause autoimmunity.
picture the difference between two cancer treatments, chemotherapy and immunotherapy. In traditional chemotherapy, toxins that destroyed fast-dividing cells got dumped into the body, ideally killing, say, a lung tumor, but taking out lots of healthy tissue as well. This was the proverbial war of attrition.
Our DNA rearranges itself in utero and forms millions of antibodies capable of binding to—and attacking—a trillion different antigens.
Dr. Janeway had discovered that our adaptive immune cells don’t attack only if they hear the proverbial ring of the bell (the antigen); they need another signal.
hard-earned knowledge to more practical things, like the interaction of the immune system with sleep, stress, allergy, cancer, or nutrition, and like poorly understood symptoms that were actually autoimmunity.
Together, AZT and a protease inhibitor led to a significant increase in CD4 cell counts.
the idea that the way you deal with a disease might well be dictated by this idea of a prime, or first point of contact.
The pioneering immunologist Paul Ehrlich introduced the term horror autotoxicus right around 1900. Autoimmunity. The body attacking itself.
Cortisol is a steroid that suppresses the immune system.
key factors that impact the balance of everyone’s immune system—namely, sleep, stress, hygiene, family history, and the ecosystem of our gut, known as the microbiome.
