Intuition can die often, but on the other hand many individual processes within immunology are somewhat well characterized as far as biology goes, and are amazing. The VDJ recombination process for B and T cell development is a stochastic-engineering-like feat of self-driven mutation (not just slight code changes but actually chopping up parts of our DNA and rearranging their order) and is occurring constantly in huge numbers of developing lymphocytes to generate structurally new proteins under very close scrutiny, allowing our immune system to adapt to previously unseen infections.
I've come to the conclusion the "immunologists" dont know enough and for a very good reason, we are unable to quantify what each and every cell contains chemically and we are unable to measure cell sensing and signally in vivo. So we dont know when a number of cells surrounding a damaged cell or pathogen are using the hydroxyl radical, arguably the most dangerous of the free radicals, to destroy or damage the damaged cell or pathogen.
As we get older, we maintain the ability to sense pathogens in the adaptive immune system, but we fail to launch a suitable response. Studies also show, flu vaccines are a waste of time if the person doesnt have a sufficient amount of B6 in their diet in order for the body to develop an immune system response. In my experience GP's never ask about our diets, they make assumptions and this is dangerous to our health. Now does osteoporosis play its part in a weaken immune system response because the quality of stem cells from the bone marrow is greatly reduced? Not found any studies looking at this angle yet.
What about Vitamin D3, the Wellcome Trust in Cambridge announced it had reversed engineered the human genome in Aug 2010, and from the research they found that there were 2776 Vit D Receptors in the human genome, most of which are concentrated around the immune system genes, so how significant is Vit D in immune system responses?
How much does Iron in the diet play a part, for example, there is a chemical reaction in the gut which can reduce Ferric iron (State3) into Ferrous iron (State2) before its absorbed, how much does dietary iron and exercise generating hydroxyl radicals play a part in innate immunology? The hydroxyl radical is generally portrayed as a very damaging chemical reaction, yet we do get told to exercise. Likewise what about water only Fasting? When looking at Lysine, its one of only two keto BC amino acids, used to treat cold sores (Herpes) as its been suggested viruses at least the Herpes virus need carbs. Bacteria can die off when there is inadequate nutrition, but they can also go dormant in the body by developing a biofilm. So even though immune cell counts go down when water only fasting, as its no longer having to attack most of the food and drink we consume, does the process of starving of viruses and bacteria make the remaining immune system cells more effective as its only having to concentrated on pathogens in the body.
I'd agree with the article in that immunology is a complex topic, but our lack of high tech scientific instruments limit our knowledge forcing the use of meta data to make conclusions and judgements, and the spooks know all too well that they can get it wrong!
>It's good to see a piece that shows how complex the science behind COVID is, in the middle of so many contradictory or over-simplified news.
It's rather unfortunate how politicized the whole issue is. I got banned from reddit for pointing out that without knowing what the r0 was for asymptomatic patients any type of lock down tells you more about the psychology of the person for or against it than about its effectiveness.
If you want a cartoon explaining some parts of the immune response in the article--try Cells at Work! It's on Netflix, last time I checked. It is surprisingly technical.
my takeaway from this is that the human body is actually really complex. even the immunologists quoted cannot say for sure about how the body responds to certain viruses. each one of us is unique and has different response levels. however, it's good to know that children have more a aggressive immune system response than older people and hopefully make their bodies somehow adapt to the Covid-19 virus.
It's two billion lines of spaghetti code created by iterative randomness and implementing its own compiler (and, as a side gig, perl)
Parts of the code have evolved to code for two entirely different functional segments depending on the direction they are read in, while others have randomly duplicated and taken on entirely new functions over time. Energy has become the specialisation of a type of bacteria that at some point somehow avoided death after being eaten by a cell and instead founded its family of somewhat strange but super-efficient metabolisers.
This is not accurate. There are extremely well enumerated principles in immunology and they can tell you with statisticly significant accuracy what will happen immunologically in your body.
What this article does it takes that small fraction of exceptions and makes it sound like it's the rule.
Think of medicine and side effects.
It's the same idea.
This article is extremely sensational fear-mongering reporting and people eat the stuff up.
How do the randomly located specialist T-Cells that "clone into a battalion" after the messenger cell show up know where to go in the body? Do they just fan out in all directions? Or is there some spl navigation mechanism?
Well a lot of the T cells will enter the bloodstream in order to spread through the body. My knowledge of this is fairly limited but chemokines serve as the navigation instruments in many cases: a site of inflammation or infection will have immune cells expressing these signaling molecules that will slowly diffuse and create a gradient. T cells (for example) will follow this gradient to get to the site of interest (the process is called chemotaxis).
No book recommendations off the top of my head, but I’ll post back if something comes up.
We don't really have good explanations on "how does anything know where to go" in biology except "brownian motion" everything goes everywhere and if the association is strong enough it sticks
Where intuition can't be relied on we must resort to experimentation. Animal and virtual models can tell us a lot, but because immunology is so contingent on the details, they can't make strong predictions about human responses. Human testing is needed for that, and even then reactions over the population can differ wildly.
But we've locked ourselves out of timely human testing. We are protective of subjects to the point that even a global pandemic can't overcome long deadly delays in testing vaccines.
So what's the alternative, Dr. Mengele? One simple word that Mengele didn't bother with: consent.
We should create a category of fully informed, fully consenting adults that are willing to subject themselves to human experimentation, even before lengthy animal testing. Give them sufficient education, training and evaluation to determine that they consent by strict criteria. Test them on their knowledge, let them decide over months. And then let the scientists administrate the test substance or placebo. With conditions monitored by a research oversight committee.
Even if it were a risky and painful process that didn't make a subject any richer, I predict that there would be hundreds of sincere volunteers. Both fools and heroes.
We should let them. It could defer large numbers of deaths.
Those fully informed and consenting adults may very well have significant selection bias and not represent the population very well. Meaning results obtained from them would not be generalizable and could run the gamut from ineffective treatment to dangerous or fatal when tried in the broader population.
This is such poor sensationalized fear-based reporting.
There are extremely well enumerated principles in immunology. There's always exceptions in any sort of molecular biology and this article makes them sound like they are the rule or the standard.
Covid is extremely tame compared to other pathogenic viruses.
You want a scary virus, look at ebola which destroys epithelial cells and has 90% fatality rate , look at HIV which integrates into your genome.
The article implies that Covid is special in some regard in how it attacks the body. It's a standard virus. Every virus on the planet has people that are susceptible to it and it kills them. Every virus on the planet can cause you damage via immune system over response. That's how influenza kills and its way better at it.
The entire human physiology and biology in general is crazy with exceptions to every rule and millions of years of evolution makes it hard for us to understand why.
All of biology is crazy and unintuitive from the tree of life down to proteomics. But to say it so unpredictable is just false.
[+] [-] medymed|5 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination
[+] [-] bionhoward|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] autisticcurio|5 years ago|reply
As we get older, we maintain the ability to sense pathogens in the adaptive immune system, but we fail to launch a suitable response. Studies also show, flu vaccines are a waste of time if the person doesnt have a sufficient amount of B6 in their diet in order for the body to develop an immune system response. In my experience GP's never ask about our diets, they make assumptions and this is dangerous to our health. Now does osteoporosis play its part in a weaken immune system response because the quality of stem cells from the bone marrow is greatly reduced? Not found any studies looking at this angle yet. What about Vitamin D3, the Wellcome Trust in Cambridge announced it had reversed engineered the human genome in Aug 2010, and from the research they found that there were 2776 Vit D Receptors in the human genome, most of which are concentrated around the immune system genes, so how significant is Vit D in immune system responses? How much does Iron in the diet play a part, for example, there is a chemical reaction in the gut which can reduce Ferric iron (State3) into Ferrous iron (State2) before its absorbed, how much does dietary iron and exercise generating hydroxyl radicals play a part in innate immunology? The hydroxyl radical is generally portrayed as a very damaging chemical reaction, yet we do get told to exercise. Likewise what about water only Fasting? When looking at Lysine, its one of only two keto BC amino acids, used to treat cold sores (Herpes) as its been suggested viruses at least the Herpes virus need carbs. Bacteria can die off when there is inadequate nutrition, but they can also go dormant in the body by developing a biofilm. So even though immune cell counts go down when water only fasting, as its no longer having to attack most of the food and drink we consume, does the process of starving of viruses and bacteria make the remaining immune system cells more effective as its only having to concentrated on pathogens in the body.
I'd agree with the article in that immunology is a complex topic, but our lack of high tech scientific instruments limit our knowledge forcing the use of meta data to make conclusions and judgements, and the spooks know all too well that they can get it wrong!
[+] [-] sgdpk|5 years ago|reply
It's good to see a piece that shows how complex the science behind COVID is, in the middle of so many contradictory or over-simplified news.
[+] [-] schemy|5 years ago|reply
It's rather unfortunate how politicized the whole issue is. I got banned from reddit for pointing out that without knowing what the r0 was for asymptomatic patients any type of lock down tells you more about the psychology of the person for or against it than about its effectiveness.
[+] [-] klodolph|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] westoque|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IfOnlyYouKnew|5 years ago|reply
Parts of the code have evolved to code for two entirely different functional segments depending on the direction they are read in, while others have randomly duplicated and taken on entirely new functions over time. Energy has become the specialisation of a type of bacteria that at some point somehow avoided death after being eaten by a cell and instead founded its family of somewhat strange but super-efficient metabolisers.
So yeah, it's complex.
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|5 years ago|reply
What this article does it takes that small fraction of exceptions and makes it sound like it's the rule.
Think of medicine and side effects. It's the same idea. This article is extremely sensational fear-mongering reporting and people eat the stuff up.
[+] [-] op03|5 years ago|reply
Any good book reco's for the layman?
[+] [-] anotherboffin|5 years ago|reply
No book recommendations off the top of my head, but I’ll post back if something comes up.
[+] [-] yread|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gverrilla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirundo|5 years ago|reply
But we've locked ourselves out of timely human testing. We are protective of subjects to the point that even a global pandemic can't overcome long deadly delays in testing vaccines.
So what's the alternative, Dr. Mengele? One simple word that Mengele didn't bother with: consent.
We should create a category of fully informed, fully consenting adults that are willing to subject themselves to human experimentation, even before lengthy animal testing. Give them sufficient education, training and evaluation to determine that they consent by strict criteria. Test them on their knowledge, let them decide over months. And then let the scientists administrate the test substance or placebo. With conditions monitored by a research oversight committee.
Even if it were a risky and painful process that didn't make a subject any richer, I predict that there would be hundreds of sincere volunteers. Both fools and heroes.
We should let them. It could defer large numbers of deaths.
[+] [-] ineedasername|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|5 years ago|reply
There are extremely well enumerated principles in immunology. There's always exceptions in any sort of molecular biology and this article makes them sound like they are the rule or the standard.
Covid is extremely tame compared to other pathogenic viruses.
You want a scary virus, look at ebola which destroys epithelial cells and has 90% fatality rate , look at HIV which integrates into your genome.
The article implies that Covid is special in some regard in how it attacks the body. It's a standard virus. Every virus on the planet has people that are susceptible to it and it kills them. Every virus on the planet can cause you damage via immune system over response. That's how influenza kills and its way better at it.
The entire human physiology and biology in general is crazy with exceptions to every rule and millions of years of evolution makes it hard for us to understand why.
All of biology is crazy and unintuitive from the tree of life down to proteomics. But to say it so unpredictable is just false.