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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Matt Richtel
On July 23, 1622, an Italian scientist named Gaspare Aselli dissected a “living well-fed dog,”
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The distant echoes of its beginnings can be found 3.5 billion years ago, roughly when bacteria, the first cellular organisms, appeared.
The fact that our version of the immune system has been around that long speaks to its power. Evolution doesn’t let things slide that long unless they work. It is an ever-vigilant, omnipresent peacekeeping force in the Festival of Life.
Another way to think about it is that bacteria can divide so quickly that if left unchecked, they could take over our entire body in four days.
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researchers isolated streptomycin, the first antibiotic that could kill tuberculosis. Selman Abraham Waksman, the head of the lab at Rutgers University where the discovery was made,
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Antibodies are protein molecules with extraordinary abilities, and they are central to the immune system.
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Antibiotics are arguably more important than vaccines. In fact they are “probably the most successful forms of chemotherapy in the history of medicine.
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The scientists took a virus from chicken eggs and killed the virus in an acid bath. Then they added this “deadened” virus to another chicken egg and then added live virus. The live virus didn’t grow. The deadened virus had interfered with the development of the live virus. Hence the name: interferon (IFN).
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By 2011, one in four children in Europe had an allergy,
Remember cytokines? They are proteins that send signals to the immune system, creating a powerful, virtually instantaneous telecommunications network, the envy of even the fastest Internet provider or connection. The commands
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The term cytokine storm actually understates how dangerous it is. Cytokine typhoon or hurricane might be more accurate.
