[Mast cells from a sinus stained in blue. Image via Wikimedia Commons & CC 2.0] On July 10, 2010, a DC restauranteur came down with what seemed to be food poisoning. He had no energy and no appetite. Rashes flared up. He could barely get out of bed. First hours and then days dragged by …
[A cancer patient rests in a hospital bed. Photo by Christine Gleason via Creative Commons 2.0 & Flickr] Tumors are master manipulators. They have to be in order to escape human immune systems. Scientists have found evidence that tumors hide by wearing biochemical disguises and some tumors can even recruit turncoat immune cells to their cause. …
[Ultrasound of a spleen by Nevit Dilmen via Wikimedia Commons & CC 2.0] Blood moves fast. It only takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to make a full circuit through your entire body, and your blood makes that journey thousands of times each day. The speed of the blood stream is a …
[Photo courtesy of Brian Giesen via Creative Commons & Flickr] “Pitch Imperfect” is a series of blog posts where I highlight stories that I pitched but didn’t quite sell and discuss why it was tough to sell them. The goal is to share both interesting research stories and some of the obstacles in getting them …
[Portrait of an HIV virus by Dominic Alves via Creative Commons & Flickr] Y’know that feeling when you stumble across a study that makes you think, “Holy s***! Scientists actually did this!!!!”? And then like two weeks later, another team of scientists manages to kind of upstage the first team’s finding? It’s been that sort …
Earlier today, I stumbled across this review of Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, that was written by a neuroscience grad student. I liked the piece, but it got me thinking…. Cahalan was a healthy 24-year-old, working at The New York Post, who suddenly “went mad” and would have almost certainly died, …
The book: Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries by Molly Caldwell Crosby (2010) What it’s about: Asleep is the story of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic that followed in the wake of the 1918 flu. Encephalitis lethargica is mainly known by the nickname “Sleeping Sickness”, but shouldn’t be confused with African …
The Talk: Host Defense and Viral Immune Evasion: A Proteomics Perspective In Plain English: Human cells and viruses are locked in a protein-based arms race for global domination: Will the cell’s defensive proteins successfully recognize viral DNA and alert the immune system? Or will the virus counter with proteins that stop the defensive proteins in …
What it’s about:
Epidemic of Absence tackles one of the trickiest and trendiest topics in 21st-century biomedical research: the complex relationship between autoimmune disease and the bacteria that live in our guts.
A growing body of evidence suggests that by decimating the number of pathogenic microbes people are exposed to, modern medicine has inadvertently shifted the ecological balance between the human immune system and the human microbiome, leaving millions of people vulnerable to allergies and autoimmune disease.
The basic evolutionary argument is that our immune system evolved to cope with a constant onslaught of opportunistic microbes by developing a complex system of checks-and-balances with our bodies’ microbial populations. With those microbes gone, many of the immune system’s coping strategies are having disastrous side effects. In this book, Velasquez-Manoff implicates the depletion of bacterial biodiversity as a driving agent in the pretty much every non-infectious disease you can think of (cancer, depression, Crohn’s, Celiac’s, allergies, and autism are all covered in this book).
The Upsides:
It’s a rare snapshot of a scientific revolution in progress. And it’s easily the most thought-provoking book I’ve read all year.