How the Immune System Works, Includes Desktop Edition [Paperback]
Author: Amazon Prime | Language: English | ISBN: 0470657294 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Fifteen easy to follow lectures, featuring the uniquely popular humorous style and engaging analogies developed by Dr Sompayrac, provide an introduction to the ‘bigger picture’, followed by practical discussion on how each of the components interacts with one another.
Now featuring full-color diagrams, this book has been rigorously updated for its fourth edition to reflect today’s immunology teaching and includes updated discussion of B and T cell memory, T cell activation, vaccines, immunodeficiency, and cancer.
Whether you are completely new to immunology, or require a refresher, How the Immune System Works is an enjoyable way of engaging with the key concepts – you need know nothing of the workings of the immune system to benefit from this book!
How the Immune System Works is now accompanied by a FREE enhanced Wiley Desktop Edition - the interactive, digital version of the book - featuring downloadable text and images, highlighting and note taking facilities, book-marking, cross-referencing, in-text searching, and linking to references and glossary terms. It is also available from CourseSmart for instant, online and offline access for studying anytime, anywhere.
- Paperback: 152 pages
- Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 4 edition (January 30, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0470657294
- ISBN-13: 978-0470657294
- Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.6 x 0.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Basic Sciences > Immunology
- #9 in Books > Medical Books > Basic Sciences > Immunology
- #12 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diseases & Physical Ailments > Immune Systems
How to Use This Book, viii
This book is neither a comprehensive text nor an exam-review tool. It is an overview of the immune system designed to give anyone who is learning immunology a feel for how the system all fits together.
The Anytime, Anywhere Textbook, ix
LECTURE 1 An Overview, 1
The immune system is a “team effort,” involving many different players who work together to provide a powerful defense against invaders. Focusing in on one player at a time makes it hard to understand the game. Here we view the action from the grandstands to get a wide-angle picture of what the immune system is all about.
LECTURE 2 The Innate Immune System, 13
The innate immune system is a “hard-wired” defense that has evolved over millions of years to recognize pathogens that commonly infect humans. It provides a rapid and powerful defense against “everyday” invaders.
LECTURE 3B Cells and Antibodies, 24
B cells and the antibodies they produce are part of the adaptive immune system. This defense evolves during our own lifetime to protect us against invaders that we, personally, have never encountered before.
LECTURE 4The Magic of Antigen Presentation, 38
T cells, another weapon of the adaptive immune system, only recognize invaders which are “properly presented” by specialized antigen presenting cells. This feature keeps these important cells focused on the particular attackers which they are able to defend against.
LECTURE 5T Cell Activation, 52
Before they can spring into action, T cells must be activated. This requirement helps ensure that only useful weapons will be mobilized.
LECTURE 6T Cells at Work, 60
Once they have been activated, helper T cells orchestrate the immune response, and killer T cells destroy infected cells.
LECTURE 7Secondary Lymphoid Organs and Lymphocyte Trafficking, 70
B and T lymphocytes travel through secondary lymphoid organs looking for the invaders they can defend against. Once activated, B and T cells are dispatched to those areas of the body in which they can be most useful.
LECTURE 8Restraining the Immune System, 81
The powerful weapons of the immune system must be restrained lest they become “overexuberant.” In addition, once an invader has been defeated, the immune system must be “reset” to prepare for future attacks.
LECTURE 9Tolerance Induction and MHC Restriction, 86
T cells must be trained to focus on appropriately presented invaders, and B and T lymphocytes must learn not to attack our own bodies.
LECTURE 10Immunological Memory, 96
B and T cells remember invaders we have previously encountered, and respond much more quickly and effectively to a subsequent attack by the same invader.
LECTURE 11Vaccines, 102
Vaccines are used to safely mimic the attack of an invader so that our immune system will be primed and ready for a real attack.
LECTURE 12The Immune System Gone Wrong, 107
The immune system generally does a good job of defending us while infl icting minimal “collateral damage.” Sometimes, however, mistakes are made.
LECTURE 13Immunodeficiency, 116
Serious disease may result when our immune system does not operate at full strength.
LECTURE 14Cancer and the Immune System, 121
Because the immune system is set up to minimize the chance that its weapons will attack our own bodies, it is not very good at defending us against cells that have become cancerous.
LECTURE 15A Critique of the Immune System, 128
The immune system has many strengths – and a few weaknesses.
Glossary, 133
Index, 136
A few reviews have said that this little 141 page text is "dated." Two persepectives:
1. The material covered is timeless. Our understanding of T and B cells will evolve over time, but the basic function, and the ideas of receptor sites, etc. are so fundamental that a few decades here or there cannot possibly subtract from the immense value of this text.
2. Current thinking ("2020") is that we're entering an era of completely recasting the immune system, with as revolutionary a paradigm shift as recombinant DNA itself. One aspect of this is thinking of this system as multiple systems (6 or more in some literature). Another is the role of microRNA (small ds- double stranded RNA) and the epigenomic phenomena of RNA-interference.
These phenomena don't subtract from antibody or cell mediated immunity as models, they ADD to them. For complete coverage of the new models, without spending a fortune or trying to scan a whole large text, see any book or recent article by Dr. Bagasra, including:Immunology and the Quest for an HIV Vaccine: A New Perspective .
That out of the way, when our ClassPros and Library Picks surveys poll med students, THIS little text has come up in the top 5 for over a decade (and the top 1 or 2 in the last 3 years)! How is it possible, with texts of 1,000 pages, that an 8.5 x 11" 141 page, colorful "High School" looking monograph consistently takes these honors?
The answer is the astonishing flow of the metaphors coupled with "aha" pictures and illustrations on every page.
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