Your Body Has This Astonishing Magical Power

A fierce champion fighter in action, representing the incredible power of the human immune system.
It's vacation time. You and your family visit a country where you've never been and, in fact, your parents or grandparents had never been. You find yourself hiking beside a beautiful lake. It's a gorgeous day. You dive in. You are not alone.
How can your T cells and B cells react to a pathogen they've never seen?
In the water swim parasites, perhaps a parasite called giardia. The invader slips in through your mouth or your urinary tract. This bug is entirely new to you, and there's more. It might be new to everyone you've ever met or come into contact with. The parasite may have evolved in this setting for hundreds of thousands of years so that it's different from any giardia bug you've ever come into contact with before or that thrives in the region where you live.
How can your T cells and B cells react to a pathogen they've never seen, never knew existed, and were never inoculated against, and that you, or your doctors, in all their wisdom, could never have foreseen?
This is the infinity problem.
For years, this was the greatest mystery in immunology.
As I reported An Elegant Defense -- my book about the science of the immune system told through the lives of scientists and medical patients -- I was repeatedly struck by the profundity of this question. It is hard to overstate: how can we survive in a world with such myriad possible threats?
Matt Richtel's new book about the science of the immune system, An Elegant Defense, was published this month.
To further underscore the quandary, the immune system has to neutralize threats without killing the rest of the body. If the immune system could just kill the rest of the body too, the solution to the problem would be easy. Nuke the whole party. That obviously won't work if we are to survive. So the immune system has to be specific to the threat while also leaving most of our organism largely alone.
"God had two options," Dr. Mark Brunvand told me. "He could turn us into ten-foot-tall pimples, or he could give us the power to fight 10 to the 12th power different pathogens." That's a trillion potential bad actors. Why pimples? Pimples are filled with white blood cells, which are rich with immune system cells. In short, you could be a gigantic immune system and nothing else, or you could have some kind of secret power that allowed you to have all the other attributes of a human being—brain, heart, organs, limbs—and still somehow magically be able to fight infinite pathogens.
Dr. Brunvand is a retired Denver oncologist, one of the many medical authorities in the book – from wizened T-cell innovator Dr. Jacques Miller, to the finder of fever, Dr. Charles Dinarello, to his eminence Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health to newly minted Nobel-Prize winner Jim Allison.
In the case of Dr. Brunvand, the oncologist also is integral to one of the book's narratives, a remarkable story of a friend of mine named Jason. Four years ago, he suffered late, late stage cancer, with 15 pounds of lymphoma growing in his back, and his oncologist put him into hospice. Then Jason became one of the first people ever to take an immunotherapy drug for lymphoma and his tumors disappeared. Through Jason's story, and a handful of other fascinating tales, I showcase how the immune system works.
There are two options for creating such a powerful immune system: we could be pimples or have some other magical power.
Dr. Brunvand had posited to me that there were two options for creating such a powerful and multifaceted immune system: we could be pimples or have some other magical power. You're not a pimple. So what was the ultimate solution?
Over the years, there were a handful of well-intentioned, thoughtful theories, but they strained to account for the inexplicable ability of the body to respond to virtually anything. The theories were complex and suffered from that peculiar side effect of having terrible names—like "side-chain theory" and "template-instructive hypothesis."
This was the background when along came Susumu Tonegawa.
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Tonegawa was born in 1939, in the Japanese port city of Nagoya, and was reared during the war. Lucky for him, his father was moved around in his job, and so Tonegawa grew up in smaller towns. Otherwise, he might've been in Nagoya on May 14,1944, when the United States sent nearly 550 B-29 bombers to take out key industrial sites there and destroyed huge swaths of the city.
Fifteen years later, in 1959, Tonegawa was a promising student when a professor in Kyoto told him that he should go to the United States because Japan lacked adequate graduate training in molecular biology. A clear, noteworthy phenomenon was taking shape: Immunology and its greatest discoveries were an international affair, discoveries made through cooperation among the world's best brains, national boundaries be damned.
Tonegawa wound up at the University of California at San Diego, at a lab in La Jolla, "the beautiful Southern California town near the Mexican border." There, in multicultural paradise, he received his PhD, studying in the lab of Masaki Hayashi and then moved to the lab of Renato Dulbecco. Dr. Dulbecco was born in Italy, got a medical degree, was recruited to serve in World War II, where he fought the French and then, when Italian fascism collapsed, joined the resistance and fought the Germans. (Eventually, he came to the United States and in 1975 won a Nobel Prize for using molecular biology to show how viruses can lead, in some cases, to tumor creation.)
In 1970, Tonegawa—now armed with a PhD—faced his own immigration conundrum. His visa was set to expire by the end of 1970, and he was forced to leave the country for two years before he could return. He found a job in Switzerland at the Basel Institute for Immunology.
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Around this time, new technology had emerged that allowed scientists to isolate different segments of an organism's genetic material. The technology allowed segments to be "cut" and then compared to one another. A truism emerged: If a researcher took one organism's genome and cut precisely the same segment over and over again, the resulting fragment of genetic material would match each time.
When you jump in that lake in a foreign land, filled with alien bugs, your body, astonishingly, well might have a defender that recognizes the creature.
This might sound obvious, but it was key to defining the consistency of an organism's genetic structure.
Then Tonegawa found the anomaly.
He was cutting segments of genetic material from within B cells. He began by comparing the segments from immature B cells, meaning, immune system cells that were still developing. When he compared identical segments in these cells, they yielded, predictably, identical fragments of genetic material. That was consistent with all previous knowledge.
But when he compared the segments to identical regions in mature B cells, the result was entirely different. This was new, distinct from any other cell or organism that had been studied. The underlying genetic material had changed.
"It was a big revelation," said Ruslan Medzhitov, a Yale scholar. "What he found, and is currently known, is that the antibody-encoding genes are unlike all other normal genes."
The antibody-encoding genes are unlike all other normal genes.
Yes, I used italics. Your immune system's incredible capabilities begin from a remarkable twist of genetics. When your immune system takes shape, it scrambles itself into millions of different combinations, random mixtures and blends. It is a kind of genetic Big Bang that creates inside your body all kinds of defenders aimed at recognizing all kinds of alien life forms.
So when you jump in that lake in a foreign land, filled with alien bugs, your body, astonishingly, well might have a defender that recognizes the creature.
Light the fireworks and send down the streamers!
As Tonegawa explored further, he discovered a pattern that described the differences between immature B cells and mature ones. Each of them shared key genetic material with one major variance: In the immature B cell, that crucial genetic material was mixed in with, and separated by, a whole array of other genetic material.
As the B cell matured into a fully functioning immune system cell, much of the genetic material dropped out. And not just that: In each maturing B cell, different material dropped out. What had begun as a vast array of genetic coding sharpened into this particular, even unique, strand of genetic material.
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This is complex stuff. But a pep talk: This section is as deep and important as any in describing the wonder of the human body. Dear reader, please soldier on!
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Researchers, who, eventually, sought a handy way to define the nature of the genetic change to the material of genes, labeled the key genetic material in an antibody with three initials: V, D, and J.
The letter V stands for variable. The variable part of the genetic material is drawn from hundreds of genes.
D stands for diversity, which is drawn from a pool of dozens of different genes.
And J is drawn from another half dozen genes.
In an immature B cell, the strands of V, D, and J material are in separate groupings, and they are separated by a relatively massive distance. But as the cell matures, a single, random copy of V remains, along with a single each of D and J, and all the other intervening material drops out. As I began to grasp this, it helped me to picture a line of genetic material stretching many miles. Suddenly, three random pieces step forward, and the rest drops away.
The combination of these genetic slices, grouped and condensed into a single cell, creates, by the power of math, trillions of different and virtually unique genetic codes.
In anticipation of threats from the unfathomable, our defenses evolved as infinity machines.
Or if you prefer a different metaphor, the body has randomly made hundreds of millions of different keys, or antibodies. Each fits a lock that is located on a pathogen. Many of these antibodies are combined such that they are alien genetic material—at least to us—and their locks will never surface in the human body. Some may not exist in the entire universe. Our bodies have come stocked with keys to the rarest and even unimaginable locks, forms of evil the world has not yet seen, but someday might. In anticipation of threats from the unfathomable, our defenses evolved as infinity machines.
"The discoveries of Tonegawa explain the genetic background allowing the enormous richness of variation among antibodies," the Nobel Prize committee wrote in its award to him years later, in 1987. "Beyond deeper knowledge of the basic structure of the immune system these discoveries will have importance in improving immunological therapy of different kinds, such as, for instance, the enforcement of vaccinations and inhibition of reactions during transplantation. Another area of importance is those diseases where the immune defense of the individual now attacks the body's own tissues, the so-called autoimmune diseases."
Indeed, these revelations are part of a period of time it would be fair to call the era of immunology, stretching from the middle of the 20th century to the present. During that period, we've come from sheer ignorance of the most basic aspects of the immune system to now being able to tinker under the hood with monoclonal antibodies and other therapies. And we are, in many ways, just at the beginning.
Interventions in health and safety often yield results that are the opposite of what policymakers were hoping for. Officials can take a science-based approach by measuring what really works instead of relying on gut intuitions.
You are driving along the highway and see an electronic sign that reads: “3,238 traffic deaths this year.” Do you think this reminder of roadside mortality would change how you drive? According to a recent, peer-reviewed study in Science, seeing that sign would make you more likely to crash. That’s ironic, given that the sign’s creators assumed it would make you safer.
The study, led by a pair of economists at the University of Toronto and University of Minnesota, examined seven years of traffic accident data from 880 electric highway sign locations in Texas, which experienced 4,480 fatalities in 2021. For one week of each month, the Texas Department of Transportation posts the latest fatality messages on signs along select traffic corridors as part of a safety campaign. Their logic is simple: Tell people to drive with care by reminding them of the dangers on the road.
But when the researchers looked at the data, they found that the number of crashes increased by 1.52 percent within three miles of these signs when compared with the same locations during the same month in previous years when signs did not show fatality information. That impact is similar to raising the speed limit by four miles or decreasing the number of highway troopers by 10 percent.
The scientists calculated that these messages contributed to 2,600 additional crashes and 16 deaths annually. They also found a social cost, meaning the financial expense borne by society as a whole due to these crashes, of $377 million per year, in Texas alone.
The cause, they argue, is distracted driving. Much like incoming texts or phone calls, these “in-your-face” messages grab your attention and undermine your focus on the road. The signs are particularly distracting and dangerous because, in communicating that many people died doing exactly what you are doing, they cause anxiety. Supporting this hypothesis, the scientists discovered that crashes increase when the signs report higher numbers of deaths. Thus, later in the year, as that total mortality figure goes up, so do the percentage of crashes.
Boomerang effects happen when those with authority, in government or business, fail to pay attention to the science. These leaders rely on armchair psychology and gut intuitions on what should work, rather than measuring what does work.
That change over time is not simply a function of changing weather, the study’s authors observed. They also found that the increase in car crashes is greatest in more complex road segments, which require greater focus to navigate.
The overall findings represent what behavioral scientists like myself call a “boomerang effect,” meaning an intervention that produces consequences opposite to those intended. Unfortunately, these effects are all too common. Between 1998 and 2004, Congress funded the $1 billion National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, which famously boomeranged. Using professional advertising and public relations firms, the campaign bombarded kids aged 9 to 18 with anti-drug messaging, focused on marijuana, on TV, radio, magazines, and websites. A 2008 study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that children and teens saw these ads two to three times per week. However, more exposure to this advertising increased the likelihood that youth used marijuana. Why? Surveys and interviews suggested that young people who saw the ads got the impression that many of their peers used marijuana. As a result, they became more likely to use the drug themselves.
Boomerang effects happen when those with authority, in government or business, fail to pay attention to the science. These leaders rely on armchair psychology and gut intuitions on what should work, rather than measuring what does work.
To be clear, message campaigns—whether on electronic signs or through advertisements—can have a substantial effect on behavior. Extensive research reveals that people can be influenced by “nudges,” which shape the environment to influence their behavior in a predictable manner. For example, a successful campaign to reduce car accidents involved sending smartphone notifications that helped drivers evaluate their performance after each trip. These messages informed drivers of their personal average and best performance, as measured by accelerometers and gyroscopes. The campaign, which ran over 21 months, significantly reduced accident frequency.
Nudges work best when rigorously tested with small-scale experiments that evaluate their impact. Because behavioral scientists are infrequently consulted in creating these policies, some studies suggest that only 62 percent have a statistically significant effect. Other research reveals that up to 15 percent of desired interventions may backfire.
In the case of roadside mortality signage, the data are damning. The new research based on the Texas signs aligns with several past studies. For instance, research has shown that increasing people’s anxiety causes them to drive worse. Another, a Virginia Tech study in a laboratory setting, found that showing drivers fatality messages increased what psychologists call “cognitive load,” or the amount of information your brain is processing, with emotionally-salient information being especially burdensome and preoccupying, thus causing more distraction.
Nonetheless, Texas, along with at least 28 other states, has pursued mortality messaging campaigns since 2012, without testing them effectively. Behavioral science is critical here: when road signs are tested by people without expertise in how minds work, the results are often counterproductive. For example, the Virginia Tech research looked at road signs that used humor, popular culture, sports, and other nontraditional themes with the goal of provoking an emotional response. When they measured how participants responded to these signs, they noticed greater cognitive activation and attention in the brain. Thus, the researchers decided, the signs worked. But a behavioral scientist would note that increased attention likely contributes to the signs’ failure. As the just-published study in Science makes clear, distracting, emotionally-loaded signs are dangerous to drivers.
But there is good news. First, in most cases, it’s very doable to run an effective small-scale study testing an intervention. States could set up a safety campaign with a few electric signs in a diversity of settings and evaluate the impact over three months on driver crashes after seeing the signs. Policymakers could ask researchers to track the data as they run ads for a few months in a variety of nationally representative markets for a few months and assess their effectiveness. They could also ask behavioral scientists whether their proposals are well designed, whether similar policies have been tried previously in other places, and how these policies have worked in practice.
Everyday citizens can write to and call their elected officials to ask them to make this kind of research a priority before embracing an untested safety campaign. More broadly, you can encourage them to avoid relying on armchair psychology and to test their intuitions before deploying initiatives that might place the public under threat.
Why we should put insects on the menu
Insects for sale at a market in Cambodia.
I walked through the Dong Makkhai forest-products market, just outside of Vientiane, the laid-back capital of the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic or Lao PDR. Piled on rough display tables were varieties of six-legged wildlife–grasshoppers, small white crickets, house crickets, mole crickets, wasps, wasp eggs and larvae, dragonflies, and dung beetles. Some were roasted or fried, but in a few cases, still alive and scrabbling at the bottom of deep plastic bowls. I crunched on some fried crickets and larvae.
One stall offered Giant Asian hornets, both babies and adults. I suppressed my inner squirm and, in the interests of world food security and equity, accepted an offer of the soft, velvety larva; they were smooth on the tongue and of a pleasantly cool, buttery-custard consistency. Because the seller had already given me a free sample, I felt obliged to buy a chunk of the nest with larvae and some dead adults, which the seller mixed with kaffir lime leaves.
The year was 2016 and I was in Lao PDR because Veterinarians without Borders/Vétérinaires sans Frontières-Canada had initiated a project on small-scale cricket farming. The intent was to organize and encourage rural women to grow crickets as a source of supplementary protein and sell them at the market for cash. As a veterinary epidemiologist, I had been trained to exterminate disease spreading insects—Lyme disease-carrying ticks, kissing bugs that carry American Sleeping Sickness and mosquitoes carrying malaria, West Nile and Zika. Now, as part of a global wave promoting insects as a sustainable food source, I was being asked to view arthropods as micro-livestock, and devise management methods to keep them alive and healthy. It was a bit of a mind-bender.
The 21st century wave of entomophagy, or insect eating, first surged in the early 2010s, promoted by a research centre in Wageningen, a university in the Netherlands, conferences organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and enthusiastic endorsements by culinary adventurers and celebrities from Europeanized cultures. Headlines announced that two billion people around the world already ate insects, and that if everyone adopted entomophagy we could reduce greenhouse gases, mitigate climate change, and reign in profligate land and water use associated with industrial livestock production.
Furthermore, eating insects was better for human health than eating beef. If we were going to feed the estimated nine billion people with whom we will share the earth in 2050, we would need to make some radical changes in our agriculture and food systems. As one author proclaimed, entomophagy presented us with a last great chance to save the planet.
In 2010, in Kunming, a friend had served me deep-fried bamboo worms. I ate them to be polite. They tasted like French fries, but with heads.
The more recent data suggests that the number of people who eat insects in various forms, though sizeable, may be closer to several hundreds of millions. I knew that from several decades of international veterinary work. Sometimes, for me, insect eating has been simply a way of acknowledging cultural diversity. In 2010, in Kunming, a friend had served me deep-fried bamboo worms. I ate them to be polite. They tasted like French fries, but with heads. My friend said he preferred them chewier. I never thought about them much after that. I certainly had not thought about them as ingredients for human health.
Is consuming insects good for human health? Researchers over the past decade have begun to tease that apart. Some think it might not be useful to use the all-encompassing term insect at all; we don’t lump cows, pigs, chickens into one culinary category. Which insects are we talking about? What are they fed? Were they farmed or foraged? Which stages of the insects are we eating? Do we eat them directly or roasted and ground up?
The overall research indicates that, in general, the usual farmed insects (crickets, locusts, mealworms, soldier fly larvae) have high levels of protein and other important nutrients. If insects are foraged by small groups in Laos, they provide excellent food supplements. Large scale foraging in response to global markets can be incredibly destructive, but soldier fly larvae fed on food waste and used as a substitute for ground up anchovies for farmed fish (as Enterra Feed in Canada does) improves ecological sustainability.
Entomophagy alone might not save the planet, but it does give us an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how we produce and harvest protein.
The author enjoys insects from the Dong Makkhai forest-products market, just outside of Vientiane, the capital of the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic.
David Waltner-Toews
Between 1961 and 2018, world chicken production increased from 4 billion to 20 billion, pork from 200 million to over 100 billion pigs, human populations doubled from 3.5 billion to more than 7 billion, and life expectancy (on average) from 52 to 72 years. These dramatic increases in food production are the result of narrowly focused scientific studies, identifying specific nutrients, antibiotics, vaccines and genetics. What has been missing is any sort of peripheral vision: what are the unintended consequences of our narrowly defined success?
If we look more broadly, we can see that this narrowly defined success led to industrial farming, which caused wealth, health and labor inequities; polluted the environment; and created grounds for disease outbreaks. Recent generations of Europeanized people inherited the ideas of eating cows, pigs and chickens, along with their products, so we were focused only on growing them as efficiently as possible. With insects, we have an exciting chance to start from scratch. Because, for Europeanized people, insect eating is so strange, we are given the chance to reimagine our whole food system in consultation with local experts in Asia and Africa (many of them villagers), and to bring together the best of both locally adapted food production and global distribution.
For this to happen, we will need to change the dietary habits of the big meat eaters. How can we get accustomed to eating bugs? There’s no one answer, but there are a few ways. In many cases, insects are ground up and added as protein supplements to foods like crackers or bars. In certain restaurants, the chefs want you to get used to seeing the bugs as you eat them. At Le Feston Nu in Paris, the Arlo Guthrie look-alike bartender poured me a beer and brought out five small plates, each featuring a different insect in a nest of figs, sun-dried tomatoes, raisins, and chopped dried tropical fruits: buffalo worms, crickets, large grasshoppers (all just crunchy and no strong flavour, maybe a little nutty), small black ants (sour bite), and fat grubs with a beak, which I later identified as palm weevil larvae, tasting a bit like dried figs.
Some entomophagy advertising has used esthetically pleasing presentations in classy restaurants. In London, at the Archipelago restaurant, I dined on Summer Nights (pan fried chermoula crickets, quinoa, spinach and dried fruit), Love-Bug Salad (baby greens with an accompanying dish of zingy, crunchy mealworms fried in olive oil, chilis, lemon grass, and garlic), Bushman’s Cavi-Err (caramel mealworms, bilinis, coconut cream and vodka jelly), and Medieaval Hive (brown butter ice cream, honey and butter caramel sauce and a baby bee drone).
The Archipelago restaurant in London serves up a Love-Bug Salad: baby greens with an accompanying dish of zingy, crunchy mealworms fried in olive oil, chilis, lemon grass, and garlic.
David Waltner-Toews
Some chefs, like Tokyo-based Shoichi Uchiyama, try to entice people with sidewalk cooking lessons. Uchiyama's menu included hornet larvae, silkworm pupae, and silkworms. The silkworm pupae were white and pink and yellow. We snipped off the ends and the larvae dropped out. My friend Zen Kawabata roasted them in a small pan over a camp stove in the street to get the "chaff" off. We made tea from the feces of worms that had fed on cherry blossoms—the tea smelled of the blossoms. One of Uchiyama-san’s assistants made noodles from buckwheat dough that included powdered whole bees.
At a book reading in a Tokyo bookstore, someone handed me a copy of the Japanese celebrity scandal magazine Friday, opened to an article celebrating the “charms of insect eating.” In a photo, scantily-clad girls were drinking vodka and nibbling giant water bugs dubbed as toe-biters, along with pickled and fried locusts and butterfly larvae. If celebrities embraced bug-eating, others might follow. When asked to prepare an article on entomophagy for the high fashion Sorbet Magazine, I started by describing a clip of Nicole Kidman delicately snacking on insects.
Taking a page from the success story of MacDonald’s, we might consider targeting children and school lunches. Kids don’t lug around the same dietary baggage as the grownups, and they can carry forward new eating habits for the long term. When I offered roasted crickets to my grandchildren, they scarfed them down. I asked my five-year-old granddaughter what she thought: she preferred the mealworms to the crickets – they didn’t have legs that caught in her teeth.
Entomo Farms in Ontario, the province where I live, was described in 2015 by Canadian Business magazine as North America’s largest supplier of edible insects for human consumption. When visiting, I popped some of their roasted crickets into my mouth. They were crunchy, a little nutty. Nothing to get squeamish over. Perhaps the human consumption is indeed growing—my wife, at least, has joined me in my entomophagy adventures. When we celebrated our wedding anniversary at the Public Bar and Restaurant in Brisbane, Australia, the “Kang Kong Worms” and “Salmon, Manuka Honey, and Black Ants” seemed almost normal. Of course, the champagne helped.