The Beautiful Cure: Harnessing Your Body’s Natural Defences

The Beautiful Cure: Harnessing Your Body’s Natural Defences

2019

This is a very fun, but very dense, book. The cover and title make it seem very pop science-y, but it's anything but. I've completed neuroscience undergraduate modules and read medical textbooks, and I found it to be something that required my full concentration to really understand. Also, on the title - whilst the book is excellent, I see few takeaways on how to ‘supercharge' your immune system

Takes you through a full chronology of key developments in immunology in a very fun way. It feels like you're there in the laboratory with some of these scientists, as they reach a blockade, realising their previous understand was entirely wrong, and being unsure of what to do next. Yet, it's always at these moments of utter exasperation does a breakthrough occur. It's fun to see how science develops in this almost literary narrative.
Some truisms about human nature can also be observed - that the people who create real, new and breakthrough understandings of something are often initially met with hostility by their peers - people who are uncomfortable with having the framework of their understanding topple over, how real innovators seem to be driven by this inner spark, that persists somehow without explanation in spite of all the external disincentives

I've got a newfound respect for immunology, which is clearly staggeringly complicated and dense.

September 22, 2023Report this review