• TheBeege@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m not on the medical side of the company, but I did pick up some interesting info from Philipp Dettmer’s Immune book.

    The human Immune system is so wildly destructive to the human body, that there are bunches and bunches of failsafes built into it to prevent it from killing you. It’s also why auto Immune diseases are so nasty.

    One of the types of immune cells is basically a toxic suicide bomber that, when called to a site of conflict, explodes and unleashes chemical warfare hell on everything indiscriminately. It’s utterly terrifying.

    Also, the immune system, like most biological processes, is just based on probabilities. Hopefully, the right two messenger cells touch each other to trigger an immune response. No vision or sound or anything like that. Just need to hope you get lucky enough that they collide into each other. The large numbers of cells and molecules involved makes things pretty likely to happen, but it’s wild to think that everything is kind of luck/probability-based. Then again, maybe it’s not, and I’m just not understanding things well enough. I’m not a doctor