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The Beautiful Cure summary

Name: The Beautiful Cure
Rating: 4.5 (58 reviews)
Author: Daniel M. Davis

Daniel M. Davis

The Revolution in Immunology and What it Means for Your Health

4.5 (58 ratings)

30 mins

Brief summary

"The Beautiful Cure" by Daniel M. Davis explores the latest advances in immunology and how they're leading to new treatments for cancer, infections, allergies, and more.

Topics

Pandemic

Table of Contents

The Beautiful Cure
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Explore the inner workings of your immune system.

Do you know what the most studied topic in human biology is? Nope – it’s not depression, digestion, or sleep. It’s the incredibly complex response of the body to a minor injury like a cut.

Anyone can tell you the basic things that happen to your body after it’s scratched or scraped. Your skin breaks, you bleed, the area turns red, and, eventually, it scabs over.

This all sounds very simple. But there’s an enormously complex system of cells, tissues, proteins, and hormones all working together to make it happen. That’s your immune system, and it actually wasn’t well understood until recently.

Fortunately, many scientists throughout history have been utterly fascinated by the human immune system. In these blinks, we’ll get acquainted with some of those scientists and their discoveries. Then we’ll take a closer look at some of the immune system’s complexities, including the surprising factors that can change how it functions.

Along the way, you’ll discover

what it means for an immune cell to be immature;
why your body sometimes attacks itself; and
the best time to use an inhaler.

Vaccines trigger the body’s adaptive immune response.

In 1721, an outbreak of smallpox in Britain grew into an epidemic. This made Britain’s royal family extremely nervous – and desperate for some form of protection. They had heard of an early form of vaccination for the disease but wanted it tested before it was used on their children.

On August 9, 1721, skin and pus from smallpox patients were rubbed into small cuts made on the arms and legs of six convicts. Another convict received a sample of skin and pus up her nose. The result? After a day or two of experiencing smallpox symptoms, all the convicts recovered.

These experiments seemed to prove that immune reactions are triggered when the body detects molecules it’s never encountered before. Then, if those same molecules appear in the body again, the immune system is ready to act.

The key message here is: Vaccines trigger the body’s adaptive immune response.

You probably already know that vaccines are vital lifesavers. But you may not have known that vaccination has preserved more human lives than almost any other service. As the smallpox story illustrates, doctors were using vaccines to help people fight disease even before they knew how vaccines worked. The actual science behind them, in fact, took a long time to discover.

Before the 1980s, scientists knew this much: two types of white blood cells, T cells and B cells, lie at the heart of immune response. On their surfaces, these cells have receptors made of long, elaborate strings of proteins that can link up with matching proteins on other molecules. This allows the cells to work together to complete various tasks.

So, if an immune cell’s receptors connect with something alien to your body, the immune cell gets “switched on” and then kills the germ or infected cell. The immune cell also multiplies, which allows your body to “remember” germs that have been inside it before and deal with them easily. This is the process that vaccines activate, and it’s known as your adaptive immune response.

Done and dusted, right? Well, not quite. If your body had an immune response every time a new substance entered it, you’d get sick every time you ate a new food. One scientist, Charles Janeway, knew there had to be more to the story.

Our innate immune systems are programmed to deal with specific threats.

In hindsight, it seems obvious. But in 1989, Charles Janeway was the first person to argue that the body can’t just react to every unknown substance that enters it. He realized that a second signal is necessary in order to kick off an immune reaction.

Janeway agreed with his predecessors that the immune system must respond to things that haven’t been in the body before. But he also argued that this response must be limited to germs. Otherwise, our immune systems would be constantly overreacting.

Dendritic cells are alarms that can alert the human body when something’s wrong.

In the 1970s, Canadian immunologist Ralph Steinman was grappling with an important yet baffling question: How, exactly, do immune reactions start?

At the time, scientists had already discovered that immune reactions couldn’t be started in a cell culture dish without some T and B cells from the spleen. But Steinman wondered what in that spleen material was so critical to kickstarting an immune reaction.

Cytokines help the body coordinate the right immune response.

Have you ever had two colds at once? It might be impossible for you to say for sure, but the answer is probably not. Even as far back as the nineteenth century, scientists were aware that being infected with two different viruses at the same time is very uncommon. But why is that?

Back in the 1950s, two scientists, Jean Lindenmann and Alick Isaacs, set out to find the answer. What they found – a new type of cell called cytokines – changed medical science forever.

Anti-cytokines stop destructive immune responses and could help cure autoimmune diseases.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that affects roughly 1 in 100 people in every country. It causes immune cells to accumulate in the joints and destroy cartilage and bone; the resulting pain and stiffness can be debilitating.

Fortunately, we now have powerful medication to treat this painful condition. But that medication may never have come about without the work of one scientist, Sir Marc Feldmann. Feldmann’s discovery of anti-cytokines sparked an industry that now provides pain relief to millions of people.

Our immune systems need stress hormones, but too much can be destructive.

In 1948, biochemist Edward Kendall obtained a substance he called adrenal compound E from pharmaceutical company Merck. He gave the compound to his partner, physician Philip Hench, who administered it to a patient with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. Two days after receiving the vaccination, the patient could walk again. It seemed like a miracle.

Nowadays, compound E is known as cortisone. Eventually, scientists discovered that cortisone was not only effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis, but could also reduce skin irritations when used in a cream.

Our immune systems function differently at certain times of day – and at certain points in our lives.

We know that planetary motions affect countless aspects of life on Earth, from the tides to the seasons. But the planets – more specifically, the cycles of day and night – affect us on an even more acute level. Statistics tell us, for example, that car accidents happen most often at 3:00 a.m.

Our immune systems, too, work differently depending on the time of day. Studies have shown that mice infected with salmonella at 10:00 a.m. – just about bedtime for mice – have a strong immune response. Being infected at 10:00 p.m., however – right when the mice are waking up – leads to a weaker immune response. It turns out that the same pattern is true for humans.

Low levels of regulatory T cells could cause all kinds of autoimmune diseases.

We often think of autoimmune diseases in isolation. Rheumatoid arthritis, for example, doesn’t really seem to have much to do with diabetes, which in turn doesn’t seem to have much to do with HIV. But in fact, that’s not quite true. Actually, autoimmune diseases may have a common underlying cause.

The work of Shimon Sakaguchi, a Japanese scientist, led to a revolution in the understanding of autoimmunity. But Sakaguchi’s work stemmed from that of two other Japanese scientists, Yasuaki Nishizuka and Teruyo Sakakura. These two were working to determine whether hormones played any role in the development of cancer.

Harnessing our immune systems’ power could help us beat all kinds of devastating diseases.

Sharon Belvin was diagnosed with stage IV melanoma at the age of 22. The skin cancer had already spread into her lungs, and doctors gave her only a 50 percent chance of surviving the next six months. Treatments like chemotherapy hadn’t worked, so, as a last-ditch effort, she signed up for an experimental clinical trial for a new medication.

After three months and four injections, the tumor in Belvin’s left lung had shrunk by 60 percent. A few more months passed, and the tumor had completely disappeared. Sharon was in remission from cancer.

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What is The Beautiful Cure about?

The Beautiful Cure (2018) is an exuberant tale of how scientists have come to a deeper understanding of the human immune system – and the ways in which their discoveries will revolutionize our health. The immune system is extraordinarily complex. But if we can use our knowledge to harness its power, we may finally win the fight against diseases and illnesses like arthritis, HIV, and even cancer.

Best quote from The Beautiful Cure

The genes which vary the most from person to person have nothing to do with our appearance but are part of our immune system.

—Daniel M. Davis

Who should read The Beautiful Cure?

Health nuts who want to understand the body’s natural defense system
People who have a chronic illness or know someone who has one
Medical students and anyone interested in human biology

About the Author

Daniel M. Davis is an immunologist whose research focuses on methods of communication between immune cells. His use of microscopy to observe an immune response led to his codiscovery of immune synapses and membrane nanotubes. He is the Director of Research at the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research and the author of The Compatibility Gene.

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