4.25 ( )

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. ( )

La capacidad del autor de hacerte comprender conceptos complejos es increible.
Si eres una persona curiosa, lee este libro. Me lo agradeces luego.
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Dettmer wonderfully describes our complicated and multilayered immune system. Quite readable for a layman like myself -- in retrospect I wish I'd taken notes. The running battle and food analogies were entertaining. ( )

The book itself was well written and presented. I however was not so enchanted reading the material because despite the boiling content down for the common man to digest I found it somewhat a boring and laborious read.

That is about the only negative I could come up with as the message of what is going on inside of us left an impression of awe and gratitude for when everything is functioning as it should. There are certainly a lot of things that can go wrong and we are fortunate there are so many back up systems in place to keep up rocking.

Of course in light of the Covid mess the understanding of what actually was taking place in there and how difficult it was to take on such a vicious virus was duly noted here.

To appreciate our bodies and what goes on to keep them running is definitely worth the time to check things out here. Just be prepared for many pages and explanations of serious science despite the distilling of the author. ( )