After news that made a splash in scientific circles failed to raise much of a ripple in mass media, the Inquirer’s Tom Avril got an ok to take a deeper look. He came back with a spritely yarn with two threads: First: The immune system’s phenomenal ability not only to custom-design an attack on intruding microbes, but to quickly reconstitute defenses if the foe shows up again, finally (after a few thousand years of wondering) has an explanation. Second: Meet the man mainly responsible for figuring it out.

It’s not a terribly long piece, but it does get readers behind the scenes of work that Science magazine dubbed one of the top ten breakthroughs of 2007. Avril is, perhaps, in spots a little breathless in his open admiration for the doc and his work. But the topic looks solid by any measure. This recount provides well-selected detail and reference concerning such things as T-cells, cancer stem cells, dendritic cells, and genetic engineering of mice. It’s not only news but the sort of story that may have a socially useful side effect. A few high school kids may decide to take, or to work harder in, that biology class after all. Maybe one of them some day will pull a scientific Paul Harvey and dig up the re-e-e-st of the immune system’s or other bodily aspect’s story (for overseas, and younger visitors to the site: meet Paul Harvey).

pic – hi res ;

-CP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.