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Philipp Dettmer

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Immune: A journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive Kindle Edition

by Philipp Dettmer (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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The book from the creator of the wildly popular science YouTube channel, Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell, a gorgeously illustrated deep dive into the immune system that will change how you think about your body forever.

Please note: the originally supplied fixed format edition of the eBook has now been replaced to address difficulties experienced by some readers. Please delete the previous version from your device and download the new edition.
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'A truly brilliant introduction to the human body's vast system for fighting infections and other threats'
JOHN GREEN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars

'Reads as if it's a riveting sci-fi novel . . . a delightful treat for the curious'
TIM URBAN, creator of Wait But Why
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You wake up and feel a tickle in your throat. Your head hurts. You're mildly annoyed as you get the kids ready for school and dress for work yourself. Meanwhile, an utterly epic war is being fought, just below your skin. Millions are fighting and dying for you to be able to complain as you drink your cup of tea and head out the door.

So what, exactly, IS your immune system?

Second only to the human brain in its complexity, it is one of the oldest and most critical facets of life on Earth. Without it, you would die within days. In Immune, Philipp Dettmer, the brains behind the most popular science channel on YouTube, takes readers on a journey through the fortress of the human body and its defences. There is a constant battle of staggering scale raging within us, full of stories of invasion, strategy, defeat, and noble self-sacrifice. In fact, in the time you've been reading this, your immune system has probably identified and eradicated a cancer cell that started to grow in your body.

Each chapter delves deeply into an element of the immune system, including defences like antibodies and inflammation as well as threats like viruses, bacteria, allergies and cancer, as Dettmer reveals why boosting your immune system is actually nonsense, how parasites sneak their way past your body's defences, how viruses - including the coronavirus - work, and what goes on in your wounds when you cut yourself.

Enlivened by engaging full-colour graphics and immersive descriptions, Immune turns one of the most intricate, interconnected, and confusing subjects - immunology - into a gripping adventure through an astonishing alien landscape.

Challenging what you know and think about your own body and how it defends you against all sorts of maladies and how it might also eventually be your own downfall, Immune is a vital and remarkably fun crash course in what is arguably, and increasingly, the most important system in the body.
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312 pages
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English
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Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date

November 2, 2021
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At its very core, the immune system is a tool to distinguish the other from the self.
Highlighted by 168 Kindle readers
An antigen is a piece of an enemy that your immune system can recognize.
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Around 541 million years ago, multicellular animal life suddenly exploded and became visible.
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Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

What Is the Immune System?

The story of the immune system begins with the story of life itself, almost 3.5 billion years ago, in some strange puddle on a hostile and vastly empty planet. We don’t know what these first living beings did, or what their deal was, but we know they very soon started to be mean to each other. If you think life is hard because you need to get up early in the morning to get your kids ready for the day, or because your burger is only lukewarm, the first living cells on earth would like a word with you. As they figured out how to transform the chemistry around them into stuff they could use while also acquiring the energy needed to keep going, some of the first cells took a shortcut. Why bother with doing all the work yourself if you could just steal from someone else? Now, there were a number of different ways to do that, like swallowing someone else whole, or ripping holes into them and slurping out their insides. But this could be dangerous, and instead of getting a free meal, you could end up as the meal of your intended victim, especially if they were bigger and stronger than you. So another way to get the prize with less of the risk might be to just get inside them and make yourself comfortable. Eat what they eat and be protected by their warm embrace. Kind of beautiful, if it wasn’t so horrible to the host.

As it became a valid strategy to become good at leeching from others, it became an evolutionary necessity to be able to defend yourself against the leeches. And so microorganisms competed and fought each other with the weapons of equals for the next 2.9 billion years. If you had a time machine and went back to marvel at the wonders of this competition, you would be pretty bored, as there was nothing big enough to see other than a few faint films of bacteria on some wet rocks. Earth was a pretty dull place for the first few billion years. Until life made, arguably, the single largest jump in complexity in its history.

We don’t know what exactly started the shift from single cells that were mostly on their own to huge collectives working closely together and specializing.

Around 541 million years ago, multicellular animal life suddenly exploded and became visible. And not only that, it became more and more diverse, extremely quickly. This, of course, created a problem for our newly evolved ancestors. For billions of years the microbes living in their tiny world had competed and fought for space and resources in every ecosystem available. And what are animals really to a bacteria and other critters if not a very nice ecosystem? An ecosystem filled top to bottom with free nutrients. So from the very start intruders and parasites were an existential danger to the existence of multicellular life.

Only multicellular beings that found ways to deal with this threat would survive and get the chance to become even more complex. Unfortunately, since cells and tissues do not really preserve well over hundreds of millions of years, we can’t look at immune system fossils. But through the magic of science we can look at the diverse tree of life and the animals that are still around today and study their immune systems. The farther separated two creatures are on the tree of life and still share a trait of the immune system, the older that trait must generally be.

So the great questions are: Where is the immune system different, and what are the common denominators between animals? Today virtually all living beings have some form of internal defense, and as living things become more complex, so do their immune systems. We can learn a lot about the age of the immune system by comparing the defenses in very distantly related animals.

Even on the smallest scale, bacteria possess ways to defend against viruses, as they can’t get taken over without a fight. In the animal world, sponges, the most basic and oldest of all animals, which have existed for more than half a billion years, possess something that probably was the first primitive immune response in animals. It is called humoral immunity. “Humor,” in this context, is an ancient Greek term that means “bodily fluids.” So humoral immunity is very tiny stuff, made out of proteins, that floats through the bodily fluids outside of the cells of an animal. These proteins hurt and kill microorganisms that have no business being there. This type of defense was so successful and useful that virtually all animals around today have it, including you, so evolution did not phase this system out, but rather, made it crucial to any immune defense. In principle, it hasn’t changed in half a billion years.

But this was only the start. Being a multicellular animal has the perk of being able to employ many different specialized cells. So it probably did not take animals too long, in evolutionary terms, to get cells that did just that: Specialize in defense. This new cell-mediated immunity was a success story right from the start. Even in worms and insects we find specialized soldier immune cells that move freely through the tiny critter bodies and can fight intruders head-on. The further up we climb the evolutionary tree, the more sophisticated the immune system becomes. But already, on the earliest branch of the vertebrate part of the tree of life, we see major innovations: The first dedicated immune organs and cell training centers, together with the emergence of one of the most powerful principles of immunity—the ability to recognize specific enemies and quickly produce a lot of dedicated weapons against them, and then to remember them in the future!

Even the most primitive vertebrates, jawless fish, who look ridiculous, have these mechanisms available to them. Over hundreds of millions of years, these defense systems got more and more sophisticated and refined. But in a nutshell, these are the basic principles, and they work well enough that they were probably around in some forms around half a billion years ago. So while the defenses you have at your disposal today are pretty great and developed, the underlying mechanisms are extremely widespread and their origins reach back hundreds of millions of years. Evolution did not have to reinvent the immune system over and over again—it found a great system and then refined it.

Which finally brings us to humanity. And to you. You get to enjoy the fruits of hundreds of millions of years of immune system refinement. You are the height of immune system development. Although, your immune system is not really inside of you. It is you. It is an expression of your biology protecting itself and making your life possible. So when we are talking about your immune system, we are talking about you.

But your immune system is also not a singular thing. It is a complex and interconnected collection of hundreds of bases and recruitment centers all over your body. They are connected by a superhighway, a network of vessels, similarly vast and omnipresent as your cardiovascular system. Even more, there is a dedicated immune organ in your chest, as big as a chicken wing, that gets less efficient as you age.

On top of organs and infrastructure, dozens of billions of immune cells patrol either these superhighways or your bloodstream and are ready to engage your enemies when called. Billions more sit guard in the tissue of your body that borders your outsides waiting for invaders to cross them. On top of these active defenses you have other defense systems made up of quintillions of protein weapons that you can think of as self-assembling, free-floating land mines. Your immune system also has dedicated universities where cells learn who to fight and how. It possesses something like the largest biological library in the universe, able to identify and remember every possible invader that you may ever encounter in your life.

At its very core, the immune system is a tool to distinguish the other from the self. It does not matter if the other means to harm you or not. If the other is not on a very exclusive guest list that grants free passage, it has to be attacked and destroyed because the other might harm you. In the world of the immune system, any “other” is not a risk worth taking. Without this commitment you would die within days. And as we will learn later, sadly, when your immune system under or overcommits, death or suffering are the consequences.

While identifying what is self and what is other is the core, it is not technically the goal of your immune system. The goal above all things is maintaining and establishing homeostasis: the equilibrium between all the elements and cells in the body. Something that can’t be overemphasized enough about the immune system is how much it tries to be balanced and how much care it puts into calming itself down and not overreacting. Peace, if you so want. A stable order that makes being alive pleasant and easy. The thing that we call health. The basis for a good and free life where we can do what we desire, not held back by pain and disease. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Review

“Immune is science communication at its most lucid and exhilarating, a tour de force of demystification. Dettmer maintains an intimate relationship with the reader while revealing the Homeric dramas that routinely unfold within us. It has a vivid clarity that never comes at the expense of the science—or the wonder, as if an entire scientific field had been translated into human.”—Ann Druyan, author of Cosmos: Possible Worlds

“Philipp Dettmer has a unique skill to show us the beauty and complexity of our world as it is revealed through a scientific understanding of it. In Immune he takes us on a tour through our own body and allows us to see and understand how our immune system actually works. A beautiful book about a complex system that our life depends on.”—Max Roser, founder of Our World in Data

“Immune reads like it’s a riveting sci-fi novel, as Philipp Dettmer takes you on a journey into the body for an up-close look at the armies of expert warriors, rogue gladiators, and stealthy detectives that protect you in the daily war against trillions of ruthless microbe enemies. By the end of the book, I understood my entire body far better than I ever had before. Immune is a delightful treat for the curious.”—Tim Urban, creator of Wait But Why

“Bringing both insight and humor to an important and relevant topic, Dettmer’s book is essential reading, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.”—Library Journal --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08YR8FNCP
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hodder & Stoughton (November 2, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 2, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 37563 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ B0B4Y2S4XT

Best Sellers Rank: #871,153 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #92 in Immunology (Kindle Store)
- #127 in Communicable Diseases (Kindle Store)
- #309 in Immunology (Books)

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Philipp Dettmer

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Philipp Dettmer is the founder and head writer of Kurzgesagt, one of the largest science channels on Youtube with over fifteen million subscribers and one billion views. After dropping out of high school at age fifteen, Philipp met a remarkable teacher who inspired in him a passion for learning and understanding the world. He went on to study history and information design with a focus on infographics. Philipp started Kurzgesagt as a passion project to explain complicated ideas from a holistic perspective. When the channel took off, Philipp dedicated himself full-time to making difficult ideas engaging and accessible.

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A. Menon

Excellent introduction to the immune system, readily understood by all

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2021

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Immune is a very well timed book on the overall functionality of the Immune system. The author does an excellent job describing how the immune system functions, what the core cellular roles are and what are the main pathogens the body is trying to protect against. The book discusses how the pieces of the immune system fit together, how immune memory works and how complicated the whole system is. Given we remain within a pandemic and there is a shockingly poor understanding of how the immune system works, what vaccines do and what are the risks we face as a species, this book is perfect for a general audience that can help anyone think about how they should be thinking about their immune system.

The authors goal is to give an overview of the immune system and the tools it uses to protect the body. The author starts by contextualizing the size of the body in cell count and the size of the body vs cells and the size of cells vs most intruders. The scale of the body's defense needs are enormous and so the author does well to give an idea of the scale of the problem the immune system faces. He starts out by discussing what we are born with and the basic cells we have to destroy bacterial intruders. He discusses the chemistry of cells and the protein foundations of almost all signaling and coordinating through the complement immune system. The author discusses how helper T-cells and B-cells coordinate with Macrophages and how dendritic cells signal which intruders are in the area. The author discusses how antigens are picked up and used as signals to trigger further cell production to combat specific pathogens where the body has a history of familiarity and highlights how the immune system has an astronomical library of how to build antibodies to protect the body. The author first details how the body fights bacterial infection and how they often enter the body by an example of if one steps on a nail. The author later gets into viral infections and how virus's use the body's own cells against oneself. The different machinery needed for viral infections is laid out and the more complex chemistry of how the immune system checks its own cells for faulty production is discussed as well as the use of interferon to slow down cellular growth generally. This picture of what goes on during a viral infection and the symptoms and risks are very informative for those who might have questions about COVID and how to think about it, though there is also a short discussion on COVID specifically at the end. The author highlights how vaccines work and the overall significant utility of them. He discusses MRNA vaccines in particular and the safety of them. This is definitely useful information in plain English that is further interpretable though the lucid writing about what goes on in the immune system when presented with antigens. Thus overall any reader would come out with a clear picture of why vaccines are so useful, how they could be risky (they trigger an immune response which inherently has some risk no matter what) and how that dwarfs the risk of a real viral immune response. The author goes on to discuss how the immune system can fail and discusses allergies briefly and how that can be seen as an immune failure. The author also goes into cancer operates and how AIDS is so challenging to fight.

Overall Immune is an excellent introduction to the immune system and how it all fits together. Having a very faded memory of biology from High School, this was really helpful for me. It gives a clear overview and provides enough information that one will feel like they have a better understanding on how to make choices about ones immune system. In a time like this, such information is quite priceless.

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Larry Steinbecker

Fascinating read! Makes a daunting subject accessible.

Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2024

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You’ll not take the miracle that is your immune system for granted after reading this witty, deep, accessible book.

An inspiring dive into the constant balancing and signaling and Goldilocks-just-right amount of automated, protein-receptor driven warfare going on your body every day. All with no conscious effort on your part!

Recommended!!

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Igo Hummaan

Truly Excellent. Brilliant Concept and Execution.

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2022

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After spending a lot of free time reading articles in scientific periodicals, books, and the occasional documentary or online video (TED talks etc), I wanted to increase my understanding of the human immune system. The idea was to go beyond the paper-thin treatments given by television media and other popular sources (who basically throw buzz-words around for a 2 minute story without really understanding things). At the same time I realized I would be overwhelmed by the level of detail and terminology in a typical college level text — typically the only places you can find real detail on a topic like this.

The world of molecular biology and immunology is awash in a very choppy, barf-inducing sea of acronyms and chemical symbols, inscrutable labels, and hair-splitting concepts (as in five different things that sound almost exactly the same but aren't so you re-read, re-read, re-read). After searching for middle ground it can be very easy to give up.

Enter this book, which goes into real depth in explaining the components of our immune system, and does use some clinical terminology but never in a way that forces you to re-read something 3 times. The author even jokes on a few occasions about how ridiculous the naming schemas and terminologies are and then sets to giving certain concepts his own (usually funnier) names. But maybe the best thing about this book is how the author weaves in an amazing collection of original, color illustrations that really help the reader reinforce and actually learn how things work. This is very smart: human beings are heavily visual creatures and with a topic this complicated having a set of detailed, intuitive visuals to go with the text is invaluable.

These aren't ordinarily text book artworks; they are designed, sequenced, and captioned in such a way that it quickly reinforces the larger concept of what you just read before you move on to the next chapter. Honestly never seen anything like it and I think it would be great if more high schools and colleges used approaches like this to keep kids from getting frustrated. I know for sure I would not have been scared away from biology and medical topics at that age, if I'd read something like this first. Imagine you have a tough scientific topic but instead of having an 800 page text book being the first thing the student is hit with, they get a book like this for the first month of class to whet their appetites and then they go into the text book with some eagerness to know more and the confidence provided by a basic but real understanding.

Because of the author's approach the book is not only informative but fun to read because you're learning stuff on a level that goes well beyond what the popular media give us, without having to slog through the way you would with a text book. All the while at the end you actually want to go and get that textbook to take your learning even further ("hey, maybe I can understand this stuff after all or at least some of it!").

Bottom line the author has done a superb job of educating us without sounding like a sleep-inducing professor or some media clown trying to be over-dramatic while getting it half right or glossing over important details. Would give it 6 stars if I could. Awesome (and I rarely use that word in book reviews : )

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angela_x

easy to understand

Reviewed in Canada on February 27, 2024

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My friend recommend to me for my G4 kid，he loves reading it so much and explain to me the mysterious system a lot. The book is a little bit heavy but easy to understand for child. Highly recommend!

Otavio

Informativo e cativante

Reviewed in Brazil on February 22, 2024

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O autor tem uma forma muito simples e eficiente de explicar e detalhar o funcionamento do sistema imunológico, é daqueles livros onde você não quer parar até chegar ao fim e esperar uma continuação.

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Good Product | Great Content

Reviewed in Mexico on May 4, 2022

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High quality materials, arrived on time, perfect conditions!

This book covers a complex subject, most points are dealt with simple examples, and occasionally condescendingly delivered analogys. No big deal, just a little annoying when you're trying to dive deep into the subject.

Let me be clear! This book heavily oversimplifies pretty much everything it talkes about.

I expected this to discourage me from finishing the book, he he he

NOT even close. After finishing the book I was left with an abundance of interesting point and a new perspective on the immune system.

IMMUNE does an excellent job getting you interested in the immune system. It goes over just enough to provide a consise and appropriately complex overview of the matter at hand.

I highly recommend it.

One person found this helpful

iris

Excelente

Reviewed in Spain on March 5, 2024

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Se lo regalé a mi hijo y está encantado, el material es de muy buen calidad y los dibujos son preciosos

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M'Lady Dupree

Beautiful and informative book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2024

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Our 9 year old asked specifically for this book after seeing the You Tube videos. The text is heavy for youngsters but explained in such a way that people of any age or education level can easily understand. We've always loved XKCD as well so this is a great into to that for our son as well. Very much recommend.

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Immune: A journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive Kindle Edition

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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