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As someone who struggles with some vague immune system issues with more questions than answers, I was shocked at how much knowledge of the immune system is pres
by yosito 4y ago
As someone who struggles with some vague immune system issues with more questions than answers, I was shocked at how much knowledge of the immune system is presented here. I was immediately curious about how I can apply this knowledge to help me understand my own immune issues. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about biology and chemistry to understand much of this. But I found this bit near the end encouraging, and a helpful summary of what is presented here:
> More broadly, the integrated approaches that we pioneered here for disentangling the immune system provide a framework for future systematic investigations ... Our analysis and the methods that we developed provide a template for future studies looking at physical cell wiring networks in detail. From these combined approaches, we may finally begin to disentangle cellular circuits in immunity and beyond, bridging from individual protein molecules to multicellular behaviour.
This seems to be a comprehensive model on a level that has never been seen before, so in that sense, I'm very excited about it. I just hope it doesn't take decades to trickle down into providers' hands who can actually do something to help patients.
- ramraj07 4y agoImmunology in general is a weird field - we simultaneously know a metric ton but also not much. It’s like kind of we know why we don’t know. I remember in one of the final viva exams of a fairly decent immunology grad student one of the committee members started asking, “what does IL-1 do? IL-2?…” until the student broke (this particular one did not, she had an answer for every major IL in the lower single digits). But how many interlukins can you even remember? There’s no rhyme or Rythm there, no med student mnemonics to get you through memorizing their function. Our system is complicated by how many components play interconnected roles all the time it’s just impossible to form a mental model of it.
- TaupeRanger 4y agoIt's much like neuroscience. We can say a lot about what individual cells and molecules do and how they interact with other cells and molecules. And yet, when it comes to actually modifying or changing anything, we're mostly hopelessly lost and nearly all of our solutions are of the variety: "put this drug into the bloodstream and see what happens, oops, that didn't work and took 5 years to complete trials, time to try the next one". The complexity is immense in biology and medicine and we have a hard time dealing with any of it in a meaningful way, other than to present extremely vague theories without practical use (like talking about "prediction" and "Markov blankets" in neuroscience, the "discontinuity" theory of immunity, etc.
- laserbeam 4y ago> I don't know enough about biology and chemistry to understand much of this. The Machinery of Life by David Goodsell is a gorgeous introductory book on the topic. I recommend it not because it's the most comprehensive, but rather because it has amazing illustrations and it's written for a general audience with the purpose to be inspiring.
- daoist_shaman 4y agoI'm sure the framework they've developed applies to more intracellular systems than immunity. This could be an exciting new language to map and define many different microbiological processes.