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February 14 - February 22, 2022
I’m not an immunologist, but a science communicator and immune system enthusiast.
let us define the premise first, so we have solid ground to stand on. What is the immune system, what is the context it works in, and what are the tiny parts that do the actual work? After we have covered these basics we will explore what happens if you hurt yourself and how your immune system rushes in to defend you. Then we’ll explore your most vulnerable parts and see how your body scrambles to protect from a serious infection. And lastly, we’ll take a look at different immune disorders like allergies and autoimmune disease and discuss how you can boost your immune system.
in some diseases the most crushing damage or even death are caused by an unhinged response to an intrusion. For example, many deaths from COVID-19 come from the immune system doing its job with too much enthusiasm.
To summarize, distinguishing between self and other is core, homeostasis is the goal, and there are seemingly infinite ways for it to all go wrong.
In the language of immunology, a protein piece that is recognized by the immune system is called an antigen.
An antigen is a piece of an enemy that your immune system can recognize.
For every possible antigen that is possible in the universe, you have the potential to recognize it inside you right now.
Without T Cells you are quite dead—they may be the most important Adaptive Immune Cell you have.
Again we see the principle of our two immune systems: The innate part does the actual fighting, but the adaptive part makes it more efficient with deadly precision.
The innate immune system is not nearly as effective against pathogenic viruses as it is against bacteria.
In short, cytokines are the molecules that activate and guide your immune system.
a spike of interferons in your blood is usually the earliest sign of a virus infection, long before any real symptom or the virus itself is detectable.
In a nutshell, Natural Killer Cells hunt two types of enemies: cells infected by viruses and cancer cells.
While the rest of the immune system looks for the presence of the unexpected, the presence of something other, Natural Killer Cells look for the absence of the expected, the absence of self. This principle is called “The Missing-Self Hypothesis.”
Why is it that we have so many different antibiotics that protect us from most types of bacteria, from the plague to urinary tract infections to blood poisoning, but nothing really great against the flu, the common cold, or the coronavirus? Well, here we encounter a fundamental problem: viruses are too similar to our own cells.
In the wild, antibiotics are typically natural compounds that microbes use to kill other microbes.
Passive immunity is basically the process of borrowing immunity against a disease or a pathogen from someone who survived something.
If you have read this far in the book you already know what active immunization is doing in your body: It creates Memory Cells that keep weapons against a specific pathogen ready.
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.
In some cases the risk of them causing the disease we want to protect against is just too high. So another method is to straight up kill the pathogen before injecting it, which is called an inactivated vaccine.
Going one step further than just killing a pathogen are subunit vaccines. Instead of injecting a whole pathogen, only subunits, or in other words, certain parts (antigens) of the pathogen, are used so they can more easily be recognized by T and B Cells—which is a very secure way of vaccinating, as it massively decreases the likelihood of an adverse reaction to the pathogen.
And lastly, let us mention the newest type of vaccine, the mRNA vaccines. The basic principle here is pretty genius, it is basically making our own cells produce antigens that the immune system can then pick up.
Basically, you inject someone with mRNA that will make a few of your cells make viral antigens, which the cell then showcases to the immune system. The immune system is pretty alarmed by this and will create defenses against this antigen.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, is a really terrifying but fascinating example to showcase what happens when your immune system breaks down.
Being allergic means that the immune system massively overreacts to something that might not be all that dangerous.
What your immune system is reacting to are antigens, the molecules of harmless substances. In the context of allergies, antigens are called allergens, although they are functionally the same: A short piece of protein, say from crabmeat, that can be recognized by your adaptive immune cells and antibodies and that causes allergy is an allergen.
You can thank the IgE Antibody for a lot of your allergy-related suffering.
Boosting the Immune System is a horrible idea that is used by people trying to make you buy useless stuff! Luckily the danger is pretty mild that you could actually boost your immune system since basically nothing you can buy legally actually does it! Even the mere term “strong immune system” is a misnomer. Over everything else, you want a balanced immune system. Homeostasis.
In general, chronic stress seems to disrupt the ability of the body to shut down inflammation and causes chronic inflammation. And as we discussed before, chronic inflammation has been linked to a higher risk for numerous diseases, from cancer to diabetes, heart and autoimmune diseases, and also a general frailty and higher chance of death.
In a nutshell, cancer is when cells in a certain part of your body begin to grow and multiply uncontrollably.
In a way this is the best and the worst time to write a book about the immune system—the best time because more people might be interested in understanding what the hell is going on inside their bodies and how the body handles diseases. But the worst time because it would be so nice to write a comprehensive explanation of COVID-19, which is presently just impossible to do as there is still so much science going on.
