Philipp Dettmer

The job of your immune system is to distinguish what is you from what isn’t, then deal with the “isn’t”—invaders (bacteria, viruses and so on) from the outside world. But it’s also charged with keeping your own body itself in line: “In fact, while you were reading the last few pages, somewhere inside you a young cancer cell was quietly eliminated by your immune cells.”
    This book is a beginner’s guide to the whole subject and is full of extraordinary things. For one, we have two immune systems in a sense: the “innate” part actually fights off pathogens, but there’s also a back-up, the “adaptive” system, which when needed makes the innate much more efficient and targeted. In top gear your own immune response is far more deadly than any germ: for example, even the appalling Ebola virus typically takes six days to kill you; unchecked, your own immune system would do the job in fifteen minutes. So it’s about fine control, about this ferocious biological watchdog giving itself just enough leash and no more; every day you tread the line between the bacterial world on one side and your own Killer T-cells on the other. As extra security, the immune system even routinely uses a form of two-step verification, exactly the way we all have to do these days when shopping online or accessing our own bank accounts.
    Immune is a summary of what your immune system is and how it all works, concluding with chapters covering auto-immune diseases (such as type-1 diabetes), allergic reactions, HIV, stress, cancer and the coronavirus pandemic. As an introduction it both makes a mind-bendingly complex subject comprehensible and avoids machine-gunning readers with scientific jargon. What it’s left me with too, for the first time, is a proper appreciation of this part of us: just like the central nervous system, our immune system is intelligent, coordinated and has a phenomenal memory. The brain gets all the publicity (and self-praise as “the most complex thing in the universe”) but your immune system is no less astonishing. Brilliant book.… (altro)