3 ms·
Immunology 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 o
by ramraj07 4y ago
Immunology 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.