A terrific book by a consummate storyteller and scientific expert considers the past and future of the body’s ability to fight disease and heal itself
Nature wants to destroy you. Evolution has been driven by aggressive forces in which organisms will enact their livelihood at the expense of yours. Any top 10 list of the greatest killers in human history will not include war or famine, or guns or drugs. Of the voracious beasts that might feed off your flesh, lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) wouldn’t even scrape into the top 20. It is the smallest things in the living world that have had the biggest impact on humankind: malaria, plague, Spanish flu, cholera, tuberculosis, HIV/Aids and smallpox. These diseases are all caused by entities unseen until modern history. From smallest to largest, Aids, smallpox and flu are triggered by viruses, which are tiny compared with the bacteria that cause cholera, plague and tuberculosis, which themselves are dwarfed by the single celled Plasmodium organisms that give us malaria – probably the single most lethal agent in our history.
These instruments of death have in effect directed the development of one of the most underappreciated parts of human biology: our immune system. Daniel Davis’s terrific book attempts to redress this understandable oversight. There’s no gentle way of saying this: immunology is hard. Among the many ways we scientifically scrutinise ourselves, it doesn’t have the visceral and artistic merit of anatomy, the mysteries of the mind of psychology or the scientific sex appeal of genetics. The study of the immune system is complex, intricate, meticulous and fiddly. A couple of years of immunology at university was painful enough, and as a grown-up science writer and broadcaster, I confess that I have quietly avoided immunity-related research as much as is polite.
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