This is the time to brush up on your knowledge of the immune system. March-April 2020 may have been better, but you can still catch up. Immune is the perfect vehicle to help you do that. The book is amazing. It is engaging, it is informative, it is clear and well-organized, it is helpful and illuminating, and it is incredibly timely. It is beautiful. Go and read it.
With enthusiasm.
Philipp Dettmer isn't an immunologist. He is a fan of the immune system. His intellectual curiosity is not dilettantish. He comes by his enthusiasm because he has had run-ins with his own immune system. He developed a food allergy when he was an adult and had to go to the hospital with shock at the age of 32.
He is an information designer. One of the largest science channels on YouTube is called Kurzgesagt-In a Nutshell, and it explains complex ideas in an accessible,holistic manner. The immune system is incredibly complex. Even though he has dedicated his career to making scientific information accessible, even though he has uploaded online videos, he decided that the best way to introduce immunity was in a book. An introduction is all the book is, as he tells you repeatedly, it is just a cursory overview of the whole intensely complicated affair. This one is one of the sporadic ones.
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Regulatory T cells are part of the immune system and can become blurry. In this book, we are trying to make clear the picture of a structured and orderly system. Regulatory T cells is one of the areas where this is harder to do than others. There is a lot of complexity buried here and a lot that is not completely understood yet.
The aim of the book is to let you appreciate the immune system without over-simplification, but not being so detailed that it becomes difficult to keep track of all of the many, many parts. He succeeds in that goal.
Is it over-analogized?
He uses analogies heavily and goes way beyond the martial analogies that are used when describing the immune system. The cells havereceptors on cell surfaces that are similar to noses the cell uses to sense its environment, while the lymph nodes havereceptors that are similar to cells from the adaptive immune system. I didn't think it was making the concepts he was presenting easier for me to understand. John Green said he liked it, so I tried to be more open minded.
From the point of view of a cell, your body is like a vast expanse of oceans, mountains, deserts and swamps. I didn't like it. He wrote that the immune system in your gut needs to be a little more tolerant than other tissues because of all the food you ingest and all of the commensal microbes living there. That made the whole thing worthwhile. I was changed.
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He compares our immune system to a training dataset for an artificial intelligence. In this comparison, we can see that the limited flora we have in our modern, relatively sterile environments might be a factor in the development of allergies and autoimmune diseases.
The person who dislikes vaccines and prefers to gain immunity through natural infections is similar to the person who goes to a self-defense class. Genius. He reminds us not to glamorize cells and pathogens, they are just sacks of proteins with behaviors that rely exclusively on chemistry, not any kind of altruistic or sinister motives. He ignores his own warnings when he goes back to those analogies.
The book is easy to read. There is no longer a chapter that is longer than 10 pages, and the tone is lively, with Dettmer addressing you directly in the second person and using lots of exclamation points. It is filled with amazing drawings of immune cells, pathogens, and other bits of our inner landscape. One of the best pieces of advice I've ever received is from a book, which states: "One of the worst things you can do late at night is to search for infections by parasites."
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