How the Immune System Works [Paperback]

Lauren M Sompayrac (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0632044136 | ISBN-13: 978-0632044139 | Publication Date: January 15, 1999 | Edition: 1

How the Immune System Works is composed of nine chapters (or 'lectures') written in a direct lecture style. The first lecture is an overview of the immune system designed to give students a glimpse of all the immune system players on the field at once. The next five lectures focus on the individual players of the innate and adaptive systems. In the seventh lecture the author shows how all these players interact with each other. The final two lectures serve as a review, as students use the concepts that they learned in the first seven lectures to examine three interesting topics: cancer and the immune system, transplant immunology; and the immunology of pregnancy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I feel that Dr Sompayrac has contributed a worthy book which I personally have enjoyed reading, and I feel it will serve as an ideal introduction to the principles of immunology for students of either a medical or scientific background."

Southampton Health Journal

"...makes a difficult subject like immunology much easier to understand. A fantastic introduction to basic immunology."

2nd Opinion, The Magazine of the Scottish Medical Schools

"...it covers each section of the immune system in the form of 'lectures' in which the author talks to you from the book as though he were in the same room.

A MUST-BUY for anyone having problems understanding the immune system (and, lets face it, who doesn't)?"

Barts and the London Chronicle

"...this brief overview of immunology is superb."

Guy's Gazette, Guy's Hospital, Medical & Dental Schools

From the Back Cover

How the Immune System Works is an irriverent, entertaining way to learn

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 111 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (January 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0632044136
• ISBN-13: 978-0632044139
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #585,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to read and learn with., May 28, 2000

By 

toothygrin "toothygrin" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: How the Immune System Works (Paperback)

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.

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

By 

Garth Snyder (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How the Immune System Works (Paperback)

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.

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Keeping It As Simple As Possible, August 21, 2001

By 

James R. Mccall (Libertyville, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How the Immune System Works (Paperback)

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.