Daniel M. Davis - The Beautiful Cure: Revealing the Immune System’s Secrets and How They Will Lead to a Revolution in Health and Wellness

Look at that flower; look how beautiful it is, said an artist to his friend. Art appreciates and celebrates that beauty, whereas science just takes it all apart. Science makes the flower dull.

The friend being addressed was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, and he thought that the artists view was a bit nutty. Feynman countered that he too could appreciate the flowers beauty, but as a scientist he knew that the inner structure of the flower is wondrous as well with its cells, its chemical and biological processes, all of its many intricate systems. In addition, Feynman explained, knowing that the flower attracts insects we might deduce that insects find the flower aesthetically pleasing, which in turn raises all sorts of questions about evolution, cognition and light. Science, Feynman said, only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds.

Feynman related this now-famous exchange in an interview on BBC TV in 1981, when I was aged eleven. I already knew that I wanted to be a scientist, but Feynman, with his strong New York accent and with roses swaying in the window behind him, captured the reason better than I could say myself. Now, leading a team of researchers to study human immune cells in minute detail, Ive seen first-hand how science reveals beauty where otherwise it might have remained hidden. The inside of the human body may not have evolved to be aesthetically pleasing like a flower, but splendour ascends from its details.

In all of human biology, the process thats been studied the most, details excavated the deepest, is the bodys response to a cut or an infection. The familiarity of the symptoms redness, tenderness and inflammation belies wonders taking place beneath the skin, where swarms of different cells move in to fight off germs, as well as repair the damage and deal with the debris. Far from conscious control, this reflex is essential for our survival.

A simple view of what is happening here is that the body attacks germs which invade the wound because our immune system is programmed to fight whatever is not part of us. But a moments reflection shows that this cannot be the whole story. Food isnt part of your body and yet your immune system mustnt react to everything you eat. More subtly, your immune system must be able to tell the difference between friendly bacteria that live in your gut, which should be left alone, and dangerous bacteria that might make you sick, which need to be dealt with.

This crucial realisation, that an immune response cant be triggered by just anything alien to the human body, came only as recently as 1989, and it would take many more years before a deeper understanding emerged. In the meantime, a painstaking, game-changing scientific adventure unfolded in which the world of immunity has opened up to reveal what it really is: not a simple circuit involving a few types of immune cells but a multilayered, dynamic lattice of interlocking subsystems, one of the most complex and important frontiers of scientific enquiry we know of. As this book will show, the many discoveries that have resulted from this adventure amount to a scientific revolution in our understanding of the human body and are set to spark a revolution for medicine in the twenty-first century.

For a start, we have come to realise that our bodys ability to fight disease is continuously changing. The power of our immune system waxes and wanes, affected by stress, old age, the time of day and our state of mind. Our immune system is in constant flux; our health balanced on a tightrope. For example, the number of immune cells in our blood tends to peak in the evening and is at its lowest in the morning. There are many changes that happen to our immune system during the night, as our body enters a different state of activity and energy use, and in turn our immune system seems to be affected by how well we sleep. Reduced sleep less than five hours per night correlates with an increased risk of the common cold and pneumonia. Among other things, this book will explore the effects of night-shift work on our immune system and whether or not practices that could reduce stress, such as tai chi or mindfulness, are able to help us fight infections.

Mysteries remain but already these discoveries challenge the simple view we once held about how our bodies fight disease and what it takes to be healthy. Even though its correct very roughly that the immune system targets whats not part of you, it has become apparent that layer upon layer of biological checks and balances, run by countless cells and molecules, regulate the process. Resolving the mysteries and the complexities allows us to approach questions of major importance to our health and well-being: why do some people get cancer and can our immune system fight it? How do vaccines work and can we make them better? What exactly is an autoimmune disease and what can we do about it? The vast majority of ailments that afflict us are cured by our bodies natural defences. Understanding and harnessing this power might turn out to be the one of the most important gifts that science gives for the health of humankind.