Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive

by Philipp Dettmer

To artificially induce the creation of Memory Cells that stick around for years, we need to activate your immune system for real. And this means it has to go through the proper steps of escalation. Two-factor authentication and all of that jazz. So we must somehow safely provoke a proper immune response but avoid causing the actual disease we want to protect ourselves against. There are a few different ways to do this. The first method basically comes back to the original principle of variolation. What if we could sort of cause the disease we want to immunize against, but just a really, really weak version of it? This is the principle of live-attenuated vaccines, where we put the real thing into our bodies, but a weak version of it. The original pathogen, like a chicken pox, measles, or mumps virus, is artificially made into a pathetic shadow of itself in a laboratory. This works especially well with viruses because, in contrast to pathogens like bacteria, they are just really simple creatures with only a handful of genes, making it easier to control how well they work. The mechanism of how live viruses are weakened is pretty interesting because it is literally using evolution. A little bit how the ancestors of dogs used to be majestic and powerful wolves that we turned into pugs and Italian greyhounds. In the case of the measles virus, for example, the virus that we use for vaccines today was isolated from a kid in the 1950s. It was cultured over and over and over again i...