Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2024
10:48 · 26M views · Aug 10, 2021
A Kurzgesagt animation giving a big-picture tour of the human immune system, its organs, transport network, and the cells it produces every day. It accompanies their IMMUNE book.
HN commenters suggest it as a simple, well-made introduction to how immune responses work when discussing infection, T cells or chronic illness.
4 comments from Hacker News
The point of a vaccine is to not get the actual virus, or at least to minimize its effects if infected. When you are infected with anything, you do not always develop anti-bodies. If you do develop anti-bodies, they might not be effective at actually stopping you from being re-infected. Everything about the virus can mutate, but the virus will always target the ACE2 binding site. The spike protein can mutate to bind to it differently, but it will always require a spike protein. (Biology is Analog, not digital) Thus targeting the spike protein is more efficient as it will be highly conserved. There is a video series that does a nice job of breaking down how your immune response works: this video The vaccine is more effective at developing anti-bodies for the spike protein as it is the only protein exposed during the process. An analogy that has helped some of my family: The virus is like a missile, and your immune system is a anti-missile system. Regardless of what the missile looks like, it has to have a warhead, and that warhead is what really defines what the entire thing does. So, if your defense systems targets the fuel of the missile, the enemy can change what fuel it runs on and evade your defense system. They can change the material it is made of, the shape of the overall device, change the propulsion and navigation systems…but the warhead can only have minor changes as it has because it it makes too many, it becomes ineffective and is no longer a threat. Thus, if your de
There is nothing in the behavior of cells that is reflective of human intelligence. Cells are "amino acid robots." They string the 26 programmed amino acids into exotic plastics/proteins to execute their programmed functions. There is no relation to human behavior in cellular behavior. At the end of an infection, most immune cells trigger "apoptosis" (controlled cellular "suicide"). At the end of a riot, police obviously do not do this. You might find this Kurzgesagt introduction to immune system behavior interesting. There are several videos in this sequence, and Kurzgesagt ultimately published a book that is worth reading. this video
> is there a department of immunology that takes over or even contributes. Because we don't see the immune system as the organ it is. Which is odd that things like vaccines are effectively medicines for that organ. But at the end of the day we still don't know 'that much' about the immune system because of its extreme complexity. It's still very difficult or impossible to target a bad acting immune response in an individual without disabling all the immune system (and yea, this puts you at a lot of risk). I like the series that Kurzgesagt made on the immune system as a way to explain this complexity a little more simply. this video
The question is how your medication interacts with "somatic hypermutation" which enables your dendritic cells to launch the cascade via t-cells which triggers antibody production by your b-cells. It would be useful to understand how your medication interacts with this process. this video Somatic hypermutation has a small discussion in the Kerzegast book. I understand that somatic hypermutation, by the removal of uracil, plays two roles, first in initial recognition of a pathogen, then second in tuning the response for variants. As I understand it, this only happens in germinal centers, the lymph nodes. [LINK] This is a question for an infectious disease specialist.