
This is a textbook that introduces the immune system in all its aspects to undergraduates, and also provides a treatment of the subject that is comprehensive enough to be useful to graduate students interested in research, and to medical students focused on clinical applications. The Eighth Edition has been thoroughly revised and updated.
Here's the 8th edition (2012):
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dx0egzl37bfsl9ur6zsg1/janeway...
Molecular Biology of The Cell by Alberts et al
Janeway’s Immunobiology
Robbin’s Pathologic Basis of Disease
All of these books are extraordinary in their sheer ability to organize thousands of small details into thematic narratives of how life operates.
They also reveal how hard we humans try to narrate life into tidy, comprehensible themes.
These books are all of an era (2005-2015), and there are probably newer ones. That said, they are a great guide for non biologists into how experts think things work.
First, as a practical matter, small molecules like antibiotics are really difficult to develop, the repertoire is limited, and toxicity is often a big problem. The possible repertoire of antibodies against a given antigen is astronomical.
In the case of antibiotic resistance, you’re dealing with an active colony of bacteria continually reproducing within one host. In vaccine immunity, reproduction is nil or extremely limited within the host (simplifying white lie), and it is mostly at the host-population level that immune evasion evolves over time, so the population dynamics are totally different.
Edit: I recommend Lange’s Medical Microbiology and Janeway’s Immunobiology for those who are interested enough in learning more.
- Algorithms - Papadimitrou and Vazirani: I had a professor who described this as a poetry book about algorithms. Alternative is Sipser
- An Introduction to Statistical Learning: This is like a diet form of Elements of Statistical Learning which is much more approachable and pragmatic.
- Janeway's Immunobiology - De facto standard of immunology. Great.
- SICP: duh
- Principles of Data Integration: This is more because the subject matter is so important and nobody really has studied fundamentals. Did you know general data integration is AI-complete? If 99% of work in AI was spent on data integration, the field would move so much faster.
If the system isn't working you probably won't live very long. And while there may be certain functional alleles that may increase odds of an initial false positive stimulation, by in large the entire class of failure known as "allergic reactions" is simply a result of how the system itself works. You don't really need to invoke genetic differences to see how it fails. This is why the hygiene hypothesis is so strong.
There are actually four major categories of hypersensitivity that involve different cell populations and signalling pathways (eg. why poison ivy allergy is different from pine allergy).
If you're interested, the Wikipedia articles aren't a bad read. I also recommend Janeway's Immunobiology as a great intro to the entire subject.
For the next academic year I'm taking the following: Biotechnology, Physical chemistry, Analytical chemistry, Instrumental analysis, Biochemistry, Drug design, Cancer bio, and doing some limited original research.
My favorite books in the past were "Cell and Molecular Biology" by Karp, "Molecular Biology" by Weaver, and "Janeway's Immunobiology", all of which enabled me to read the primary literature and contributed greatly to how I now see the world. There are also a bunch of poor or suboptimal ones that are not really worth worth pursuing. Once you read a few good texts, jumping right into a journal of interest is highly integrative!
Perhaps this is unwise of me, but I haven't yet made note of any of the people that are doing the reseach I'm most interested in. Even if I did, I probably won't be able to do work with them at this early stage.
In any case, my hope is that I can spend most of my time coding and searching through the chemical state space and biochemical pathways with computers. I strongly feel high-throughput techniques are indespensible and need to be utilized to make the best use of limited, prescious time. I would still enjoy spending some days in the lab running assays as they can also be quite fun.