Immune

What Hacker News says

1. Terr_Sep 2026
   As a book recommendation: Immune - Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Dettmer, Philipp.

   Or for something a bit more immediate and casual, the Kurzgesagt playlist of immune-system videos. [0]

   [0] https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLFs4vir_WsTyS2cy4vj4obl5igqC...

   thread
2. testingonetwo34Jul 2026
   Her optimism and creativity to overcome the disability and live her life is powerfully inspirational.

   I wish I could apply that optimism to my perception of a societal shift away from disability accomodations and the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy... Enabling parents to foster unvaccinated children is a guarantee that we'll get a resurgence of this type of disease.

   I recommend everyone educate themselves on our immune system: the book "Immune" (ISBN: 1529360684) introduces the vast complexity in a very approachable manner. Also the podcasts through MicrobeTV by Vincent Racaniello are excellent.

   Show morethread
3. testdelacc1Oct 2025
   Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive By Philipp Dettmer. If you’ve heard of the Kurzgesagt channel on YouTube, it’s very similar in style.

   https://www.philippdettmer.net/immune

   thread
4. philsnowApr 2025
   My interest in biology isn’t driven at all by stories, history, or “adventure”, but rather by the awe-inspiring complexity and majesty of all the microbiological processes and their interplay.

   Yes, it’s pop science, but last be year I read through Philipp Dettmer’s “Immune”, and the description of how the immune system continuously generates random/arbitrary sequences of nucleotides, builds the proteins that those sequences encode, and then subjects the resulting proteins to a “is this a ‘me’ protein or an ‘other’ protein?” gauntlet, the latter path of which allows the body to create antibodies for completely novel proteins... is just incredible.

   I have an idle fantasy that, in the afterlife, I’ll be able to ask God questions like “so what are quarks made of?”, “why is the speed of light what it is and not any faster/slower? What would the universe have been like if the speed of light were several orders of magnitude faster/slower?”, “is there a single force that unifies all the ones that humans know about? What would the universe have been like if the weak nuclear force were just a tiny bit weaker?”, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.

   Show morethread
5. b3lvedereFeb 2025
   Ain't that the truth.

   For instance: Before following Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell and purchasing Mr. Philipp Dettmer's amazing book called Immune, i had never even heard of the complement system.

   thread
6. khazhouxJan 2025
   Unfortunately many of the books I had time to read this year were a bust. But here's some of the ones I did appreciate very much:

   * Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive - Philipp Dettmer.

   * The Gene: An Intimate History - Mukherjee. Won't necessarily teach you much new if you've already read a few genetics books, but a fine read nonetheless.

   * On Sophistical Refutations - Aristotle. Like anything by Aristotle, read it with a grain of salt and as historical document. Still, it's always a wonder how a text like this can be over 2000 years old.

   * Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI - David Grann. Skip the movie and read this instead.

   * 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles Mann. It challenges common misunderstandings of pre-columbian society without being anti-Columbus.

   * American History, Combined Edition: 1492-Present - Thomas Kidd. Goes beyond just the usual narratives we are all familiar with. Not recommended as a first American-history deep-dive, but a fine supplement.

   * The Man Who Saved Cincinnati - Peter Bronson. Entertaining civil war history book. It's not only about Cincinnati.

   * Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power - Carwardine.

   * The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets - Thomas Cech. RNA is now kinda required reading since 2020. This is a good starting point.

   * The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie - Dawkins. His latest is definitely worth a read, like (nearly) all his previous.

   * Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI - Harari. How information traveled historically, with modern technology, and in the near future. Enlightening and a little scary.

   * Beauty and Sadness: Mahler's 11 Symphonies - David Vernon. Even if you haven’t listened to all of Mahler’s symphonies, still very interesting read on “the first modern composer.” If you /are/ familiar with all his symphonies, the book is even better, and it will show you layers you didn’t realize were there... in case the music isn't dense enough to absorb by itself ;-)

   Fiction:

   * Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir.

   * Dark Matter - Blake Crouch.

   * Red Rising - Pierce Brown. A light read, maybe will seem derivative at this point but it was fun.

   * Rifters Trilogy - Peter Watts. Super bleak, very creative.

   * You Like It Darker - Stephen King. Another fine collection of short stories.

   * The Forest of Lost Souls - Koontz

   * House of Leaves - Danielewski. I waited way too long to read this. As good as everyone said it would be.

   Show morethread