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Elegance Of The Immune System
Have you ever wondered how our body can recover from almost every disease in existence?
Granted we do have the largest medical library in existence, but most drugs help/assist in our recovery.
An analogy would be how tanks could change the fate of a war, but they'd be irrelevant if there weren't any soldiers to man them.
In order to combat a disease, our immune system need to know it's weaknesses before it can multiply enough in our body to kill us.
That'd be equivalent to you unearthing a complex bomb in your garden, and you defusing it before it's timer of 2 seconds runs out.
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So How Does The Immune System Do It?
A bacterium inside you can multiple and mutate over generations in the time it takes for you to finish a cup of warm tea for that sore throat.
So how do you counter a weapon that itself adapts multiple times?
That's where our Adaptive Immune System comes in.
It has a weapon for every single enemy that has existed, exists and will ever exist
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For every possible antigen that is possible in the universe, you have the potential to recognize it inside you right now
PHILIPP DETTMER
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How Can It Do That?
In order to create such a vast library of solutions for every possible disease that could exist, your immune system does something extraordinarily brute force yet elegant.
It has a small number of gene fragments , each granting the cell the ability to identify a specific type of protein that could show up on a bacterium/virus.
The immune system then mixes and matches these gene fragments randomly. Basically shuffling the deck over and over again.
Once that's done, it's then taken to the Thymus , where the cell created is tested to make sure it cannot harm any of your own cells.
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The Thymus
Since your immune system creates an infinite amount of cells, it also creates cells that can kill your own cells. Your thymus is crucial for identifying identification.
Your thymus contains a sample of every possible cell in your body, and the immune system tests its weapons there to make sure they don't react to any bodily cell.
A small University where your immune cells either pass with flying colors, or get killed.
Pretty grim if you ask me, but essential to our continued existence.
And there you have the largest, self assembling library that will ever exist. An all powerful system, that lets
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IDEAS CURATED BY
CURATOR'S NOTE
In awe of how amazingly complex our immune system is, and how it functions on a cellular level.
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Irfan S's ideas are part of this journey:
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