Powerful ideas from top nonfiction
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 7,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
An Elegant Defense summary
Matt Richtel
The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives
35 mins
Topics
Table of Contents
An Elegant Defense
Summary of 11 key ideas
Audio & text in the Blinkist app
Key idea 1 of 11
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.
Want to see all full key ideas from An Elegant Defense?
Key ideas in An Elegant Defense
More knowledge in less time
Read or listen
Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.
Find your next read
Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.
Shortcasts New
We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.
What is An Elegant Defense about?
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.”
Who should read An Elegant Defense?
- Curious readers wondering how the immune system works
- Students of immunology
- People seeking better health
Categories with An Elegant Defense
Books like An Elegant Defense
People ❤️ Blinkist
Sven O.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Thi Viet Quynh N.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Jonathan A.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Renee D.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
People also liked
Start growing with Blinkist now
27 Million
Downloads on all platforms
4.7 Stars
Average ratings on iOS and Google Play
91%
Of Blinkist members create a better reading habit*
*Based on survey data from Blinkist customers