5 ms·
You already have the Library of Alexandria. That's your lymph nodes. What vaccines do is move some books to the front of the building, so your dentritic cells
by blip54321 5y ago
You already have the Library of Alexandria. That's your lymph nodes.
What vaccines do is move some books to the front of the building, so your dentritic cells don't have to spend a few days finding them.
You want the right books at the front. A mission to move all the books to the front is perhaps misguided.
- cma 5y agoI think it is more like the library of Borges, but with stuff that would interact with self culled.
- sdenton4 5y agoWe have an infinite library, but the literary criticism section has been carefully curated to remove all criticism of books in this library. The Library of Burges, though, we are happy to criticize unto oblivion.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoSome libraries don't have certain books. Vaccines buy those books for your library (and, as you say, put them in the front).
- majkinetor 5y agoNot those books. More like snippets of those books.
- trhway 5y agoand then second edition of the book comes out with that snippet deleted or updated to look completely different.
- tux3 5y agoYou have antibodies that will bind to just about anything foreign, including viruses that your body has never seen before, M-type immunoglobulin (IgM). It's the kind of antibodies that responds in the first phases of an infection. The problem is that IgMs are not very specific. They bind to a lot of things, but they bind poorly. In the library of Alexandria analogy, it's like a book that happens to mention a subject you care about, but only in passing. Vaccines (and infections) result in your immune system developing IgG. That's the hyper-specific books for the pathogen you care about. So it's not that the book wasn't at the front. Your immune system has to write the book on the fly, during the fight, using chopped up pieces of pathogen gathered by antigen-presenting cells.
- mmastrac 5y agoIs there a good resource to learn more about this without a Biology degree? I always assumed the body generated matching snippets at random and the law of large numbers would result in a match eventually.
- majkinetor 5y agoAFAIK it does.
- webwielder2 5y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Immune-Kurzgesagt-gorgeously-illustrated-immune-ebook/dp/B08YR8FNCP https://www.amazon.com/Immune-Kurzgesagt-gorgeously-illustra...
- tux3 5y ago>Is there a good resource to learn more about this without a Biology degree? Immunology is complicated. Some people call it the second most complicated system, behind the human brain. Someone else has mentioned the Kurzgesagt resources, which are great. If you want something more formal, OME is also a great resource I think. https://onlinemeded.org/spa/immunology https://onlinemeded.org/spa/immunology >I always assumed the body generated matching snippets at random and the law of large numbers would result in a match eventually. Right. Antibodies have a Y shape, where the two tips of the Y are variable, and the base is fixed. The IgM are the completely random snippets that happen to match a wide variety of things. However, because it's chemistry, it's more subtle than match or no match. Think of it like a variable degree of stickiness. When a pathogen is found, your body is going to iteratively mutate new antibodies and select those that bind the best to the collected antigens, until you have something very specific (= sticks very readily). I'm simplifying a little bit, but that's the process for generating IgGs that I was talking about.
- pas 5y agoDo we know how exactly this happens? How fast this process "converges"? How big is the search space and how fast new candidates are generated?
- catillac 5y agoI’m not sure this is fully accurate, but I would like the analogy of vaccines being like an LRU cache.
- BurningFrog 5y agoThat implies that each new vaccine diminishes other immunities, making it a zero sum game. Is that actually how it works in any sense?
- lvs 5y agoNo, your analogy is wrong. You have a million monkeys with a million typewriters. Vaccination just reproduces the things that look like books.
- contravariant 5y agoThe lymph nodes are more like the library of babel, endlessly toiling to find those rare 'books' that actually contain meaningful information.