91 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Easy to read and learn with., May 28, 2000
I am a Board Certified Allergist/Immunologist and I bought the book to help me to solidify my knowledge of basic immunology.
Since the American Board of Allergy and Immunology only issues 10-year certification --and I took the exam the first time in 1991 -- I have to take a multiple choice recert exam soon. The book is helping me prepare by reviewing current basic Immunology in a very easy to understand (and therefore easy to REMEMBER) fashion.
The prose is not prosaic, it's fun! The writing describes the immune system's structure and functioning clearly and logically. It does an excellent job of tying everything together, which can be difficult with the expanding "octopus" of detail that comprises modern immunology.
I highly recommend this for physicians and students of medicine or immunology.
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38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic; the perfect exposition of basic immunology, May 12, 2002
After slogging through Janeway's _Immunobiology_ and most of a course in immunology, I had memorized a lot of facts but still understood next to nothing about the overall "design" and operation of the immune system. I found _How the Immune System Works_ the perfect antidote to my existential ennui. I recommend it highly and wish there were similar books on other related subjects.
The main pleasure of this book is that it's very "why-oriented" - Sompayrac explains how each mechanism fits into the grand scheme of immunology. Another key innovation is that he points out areas of immunology that aren't well understood yet; that way, you can recognize them as gaps in the science at large rather than as gaps in your own understanding.
Other virtues include brevity, judicious omission of irrelevant detail (this book omits the customary table of 30-odd cytokines along with a list of the 10 or 15 actions of each, for example), and an engaging and readable style.
2006 UPDATE (ORIGINAL REVIEW WAS MAY, 2002): I'm so glad to see this book continuing to get great reviews. Having completed the rest of medical school, I can now say that this is the single highest-value text I encountered on any medical subject.
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48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Keeping It As Simple As Possible, August 21, 2001
The immune system is distributed throughout the body, but can still usefully be viewed as singular. The body is always under threat from tiny invaders, and it is only the various parts of our immune system, working together, that makes it possible for us to repel them. Without it, we would be dead very quickly.
This book gives a good overview of the immune system, with enough detail to understand how the various cells and tissues do what they do. How does the system recognize invaders? How does it recognize self, and leave self alone? Why is foreign tissue rejected? How can the system go wrong? What is the role of the Major Histocompatibility Complex? How do we get immunity? The mechanisms cells use are molecularprotein, mostlyand the immune system is all about protein switches, detectors, and processors. The above questions and others are answered by invoking the protein mechanisms, and explaining how the cells of the immune system can do the magic that they do in recognizing and responding appropriately to the millions of different possible invaders, and why some parts of the system take longer than others to swing into action.
The only background you really need for this book is an intelligent laymans interest in science. You should know what proteins are (chains of amino acids), more-or-less how DNA and RNA work, and the ability to follow a technical discussion. The book was written for medical students, but knowledge of anatomy and physiology is not put to use here. The discussion is chatty, informal, and repetitive. Each of the first several chapters ends in a summary diagram of the system interactions that have been discussed up to that point, and each next chapter begins by giving an extensive review of the previous one.
In spite of this, the exposition is confusing. The author is doing what he can, but the immune system is inherently difficult to follow. It consists of many sloppy loops that interact with each other in approximate and varying ways. Moreover, certain important interactions are still not understood very well (as the author emphasizes), so there is some fuzziness in the picture. But the last two chapters, on auto-immune diseases and cancer, use what went before, and give the reader some perspective on the general mechanisms.
This is a satisfying book, and a real service. It is bringing together knowledge that otherwise would be scattered in research papers, or buried in technical books, and making it accessible. The level is low enough to explain the mechanisms, but leaves out much messiness that clinicians would probably need. No one would feel when they had finished only this book that they could treat an immune system disorder, but they would at least feel that they could comprehend it.
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