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Zusammenfassung von An Elegant Defense

Name: An Elegant Defense
Rating: 4.6 (124 reviews)
Author: Matt Richtel

Matt Richtel

The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

4.6 (124 Bewertungen)

35 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

An Elegant Defense by Matt Richtel explores the complex world of the immune system, its role in health and disease, and the latest research on its relationship to the human brain and behavior.

Themen

Pandemie

Inhaltsübersicht

An Elegant Defense
in 11 Kernaussagen verstehen

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Kernaussage 1 von 11

What’s in it for me? Discover the wild world of the immune system.

The author, Matt Richtel, put pen to paper when he witnessed a miracle.

His dear friend Jason Greenstein, who’d been on the verge of succumbing to cancer, was cured. Thanks to a new drug that harnesses the powers of the immune system, he was able to beat the unbeatable.

That’s when Richtel decided to write An Elegant Defense. The seemingly miraculous recovery of his friend had ignited his imagination. If we could tinker with the human immune system and tap into its awesome power – and with such amazing results! – then what disease couldn’t we conquer?

In his book, Richtel went on to lay out the history of immunology – the branch of medicine dedicated to the immune system. And he told that history in an unconventional way, weaving it together with the personal stories of four people whose health conditions dovetail with advances in the field.

In these blinks, we’ll follow Richtel’s lead and take a whirlwind tour of that history, and then we’ll focus on one of those stories – Jason’s, which has an important lesson to teach us about both the progress and the limits of our ability to direct and command our elegant defense.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn:

the difference between a neutrophil and a dendritic cell;
which animals led to the discovery of the immune system; and
why it’s dangerous when the immune system overreacts.

Life inside you is like a massive festival – and your immune system is in charge of ejecting dangerous gate-crashers.

Imagine a huge party – a massive, rip-roaring carnival with hundreds of billions of attendees. Where is this wild, gargantuan bash with a guest list well over a hundred times larger than Earth’s human population?

It’s inside you. The merrymakers are your own cells, as well as billions of bacteria and viruses. This party is what the author calls the Festival of Life.

At this festival, making sure everything runs smoothly, are janitors and handymen, security personnel and emergency responders – the cells that constitute your immune system. They are your body’s elegant defense. They attend to tissue damage and clean up toxins. And they fight off malicious intruders known as pathogens.

Pathogens are disease-causing agents, and they come in three main forms: bacteria, viruses and parasites. For the purposes of these blinks, we’ll be focusing only on the first two.

In their most dangerous forms, you can think of them as tiny little killers. They’re small – really small. You can fit a few thousand bacteria inside one human cell. Viruses are even smaller. A few thousand would fit inside a single bacterium.

But a quick caveat: though some bacteria and viruses are pathogenic, most aren’t. In fact, a mere one percent of all bacteria are likely to cause illness. And as for viruses, some of them are crucial to our survival. For instance, about eight percent of our genetic material was created by retroviruses, a special variety of virus that invades human cells and literally becomes part of our DNA.

So viruses and bacteria aren’t inherently bad – far from it. But a handful of them are deadly indeed.

Just take the bacterium known as Yersinia pestis. It’s responsible for causing the Black Plague, which killed upward of 30 percent of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. Some other nasty bacteria include salmonella, E. coli and tetanus bacillus, while the long list of deadly viruses includes Ebola, HIV, smallpox, flu and rabies.

Prior to 1900, influenza (a viral infection) and pneumonia (an inflammation that can be viral or bacterial) were major killers, responsible for more deaths out of every 100,000 patients than any other disease. Compared with these earlier numbers, the current death rate is extremely low.

How did we beat back these pathogens? Well, you’re going to get the long answer, which is the story of the discovery of the immune system.

Three puzzling discoveries laid the foundation for the field of immunology.

The field of immunology can be traced back to a mystery – or, rather, three mysteries: the mysteries of a chicken, a dog and a starfish. Let’s start with the chicken.

One day in the sixteenth century, while dissecting a chicken, a young Italian anatomist named Fabricius ab Aquapendente discovered a mysterious organ. Located beneath the bird’s tail, and shaped like a pouch, it served no apparent function.

Dr. Jacques Miller discovered that the thymus is of great importance.

It was the late 1950s, and Dr. Jacques Miller had a lot of dying mice on his hands. Whenever a new mouse died – and that happened regularly – Dr. Miller would cut it open and see the same thing: a little mouse liver covered in lesions. Each mouse had been ravaged by severe infection.

What happened to these poor mice? And who is this scalpel-happy Dr. Miller?

Dr. Miller deduced that T. cells derive from the thymus.

What is self and what is alien to self? What is a part of you and what is other? How does the body know, for instance, which bacteria to attack and which to let alone?

When Dr. Jacques Miller was conducting his research, there weren’t any definitive answers to such questions, but one thing was certain: the immune system could distinguish between self and non-self, though sometimes it would mistake help for harm.

Confusing evidence led researchers to hypothesize that T cells weren’t the only lymphocytes.

In 1954, the bursa, that pouch-like organ that had so puzzled the young Italian Fabricius ab Aquapendente, finally got its moment in the scientific limelight. A researcher discovered that removing the bursa from chickens severely hindered the animals’ ability to produce antibodies.

In other words, if you removed the bursa, you significantly reduced the number of antibodies. Why was this a big deal?

T cells and B cells are your body’s precision defenders.

In the end, after another series of experiments, Dr. Jacques Miller proved Dr. Max Cooper’s hypothesis.

He discovered that there are indeed two types of lymphocytes – T cells and B cells – and that the B cells originate in bone marrow. These cells make up about 40 percent of human white blood cells – cells that, in addition to explaining the mystery of Gaspare Aselli’s white-blooded dog, are absolutely crucial to survival.

Susumo Tonegawa discovered how our bodies can detect an infinite array of antigens.

Imagine you’re in a foreign country. While there, you take a swim in a lake. A bit of water gets up your nose, and in that water is a malicious bacterium that neither you nor any of your ancestors has ever been exposed to. The antigen it expresses is utterly foreign to your entire system.

How can your body possibly possess an antibody that corresponds to it?

There are two immune systems; combined, they determine how our body defends itself.

When your body is invaded by a pathogen, an array of defenses is set in motion. You’re now in a position to understand how these defenses combine.

First, the generic defense. Remember the phagocytic cells observed by Élie Metchnikoff? Well, they come in a variety of different forms. One of these is the neutrophil. These cells constitute about 50 or 60 percent of your white blood cells, and they’re naturally drawn to infection.

Cells communicate using cytokines, which both encourage and discourage immune-system attacks.

By now, you’ve got a pretty firm grasp on how the immune system works. There’s one more component – how cells communicate with one another.

Your body is essentially equipped with an all-natural telecommunications system. It works like this.

Jason Greenstein struggled with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer that attacks the immune system.

It’s time to meet Jason Greenstein. Jason and the author had been friends since childhood – and Jason had always been a vibrant human being, living life his own way.

As a teenager, he was a talented athlete, dominating the basketball court, but he never flaunted his skills or mocked less able players. He always encouraged the author, for instance, who was not nearly as physically adroit as Jason.

Jason beat his cancer, but succumbed to attacks from his own immune system.

Jason had always been a fighter. So he fought. He did chemotherapy – then, when he relapsed, another bout of chemo. When that didn’t work, he had a bone marrow transplant, which wiped out the cancerous B cells (and the healthy ones, too). Still, the cancer came back.

These procedures are devastating in the extreme. Jason’s ability to produce normal blood cells had been severely compromised, and he was neutropenic, meaning he had critically low levels of neutrophils, the white blood cells that act as the body’s first responders. Jason was desolate, his body utterly decimated. Giving up began to sound better than fighting on. Indeed, he was too weak to undergo any further approved treatments.

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Worum geht es in An Elegant Defense?

An Elegant Defense (2019) is an erudite and approachable exploration of the immune system. Using the difficult story of a dear friend as a starting point, author Matt Richtel leads the reader through a mind-boggling tour of one of the world’s most complex systems – what he calls our “elegant defense.”

Wer An Elegant Defense lesen sollte

Curious readers wondering how the immune system works
Students of immunology
People seeking better health

Über den Autor

Matt Richtel is a writer and journalist. His reporting for the New York Times won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2010; since then, he’s written several novels, including Doomsday Equation and Dead on Arrival. His nonfiction titles include A Deadly Wandering, which was named one of 2014’s best books by the San Francisco Chronicle and Amazon.

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