Skip to main content

The Beautiful Cure - Daniel Davis ****

The subtitle of this book, 'Harnessing Your Body's Natural Defences' makes it sounds like a celebrity lifestyle book, or a collection of New Age nonsense. But this is a very different beast from its (dare I say it, possibly intentionally misleading) subtitle: instead its a scientific exploration of the immune system.

 Despite the woo of alternative health practitioners, the immune system is not a single thing, but rather a complex collection of mechanisms that between them help us fight off invading organisms. And Daniel Davis's book is not a 'how to' manual, but rather a description of how we have gradually uncovered the workings of the many components and how it may be possible to make more of our immune system's powerful capabilities by manipulating it into doing an even better job than it does at the moment.

Professor of immunology Davis has an approachable, easy style, helped by the fact that he doesn't try to be literary. I loved the way that he comments 'It's common for science books which feature medical advances to include anecdotes of patients' stories as an emotive hook to the narrative. Encouraged by my publisher to do this, I asked my son, aged twelve at the time, what he thought of his asthma inhaler. He looked at me as if I'd just asked "Shall we go to Mars today?" and walked out of the room.' The only thing I'd add to his remark is the word 'bad', to make it 'It's common for bad science books...'

 We discover a collection of detective stories as various scientists and teams in history (much of it surprisingly recent history) discover how different aspects of the immune system work. This proved an immensely complicated challenge, because of the sheer number of components involved, often interacting with each other, so that a single simple assumption like 'a foreign body triggers an immune reaction' proved far too simple. Davis brings both the effort required in this scientific work and the human nature of the researchers alive - I like that he has not covered up where there have been disputes and even legal action in pursuit of 'I got there first.'

 I readily admit I am not a natural reader for this book. I hate anything medical - I'd rather not know and go on in blissful ignorance. But as this is really a book about molecular biology that happens to be oriented to the way the immune system deals with invaders and cancers I found it a lot less stressful than I had imagined.

 There is only one reason I haven't given the book five stars - and that's because after a while, to the outsider it starts to get a bit samey. When you've heard of one molecule or set of molecules being tracked down through careful, repetitive work, it's quite similar to another molecule or molecules being tracked down. This is in no sense Davis's fault - he makes an excellent job of it - it's the nature of the science. As Davis has a physics background, he might forgive me for quoting Richard Feynman who, on discovering biology students had learned many esoteric names for biological components commented to them 'Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology.' The fact is biology is far more complex in terms of its component parts than anything in physics, and as a result it can be hard going.

'Yet another molecule' weariness only set in well through the book, and I would highly recommend it, whether you are the sort of person who thinks a 'detox drink' can reboot your immune system or just wonder why it's so difficult to provide an effective flu vaccine. Another excellent read from Daniel Davis.

Hardback:  

 Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more