Thanks for a detailed writeup, which seems for the most part in agreement with my understanding technically. But then you kinda tried to summarize janeways in a few paragraphs, and that means no one who doesn't already know immunology is going to find it helpful. In fact, Janeway itself tries to summarize their book in the first chapter and that chapter goes on for 50 pages iirc.
Some fundamental concepts that might fly over someone without a biology degree might include the absolutely fundamental requirement of protein binding for any biological process (akin to a transistors function for a computing device).
I'm thinking that step one of communicating the entire immune systems complexity is probably omission, of anything that's not absolutely required for comprehension of the basic concept. In that regard I'm not convinced there's any need for bringing up the innate system first (there's a reason we discovered it quite recently, perhaps?). Other details can also be similarly "omitted" for simplicity perhaps. What are your thoughts?
I haven't heard of Janeway's, and I apologize for the lack of proofreading. The immune system is one of the most fascinating things I've ever deep dived into. So I can get a bit ramble when the chance to ramble occurs.
There are so many odd facets of it with interesting implications; like did you know exposure to sex hormones actually contributes to the atrophy of the Thymus over time? This is posited to have some relation to the increased likelyhood of developing autoimmunity 0roblems as we get older.
Also, not all T cell lines undergo adverse selection in the Thymus. There is a smaller population of more autoimmune sensitive cells that develop and specialize in the extremities. It is theorized this is evolutionary selected for because there is a tradeoff between being able to develop to a wide variety of pathogens, and being free of auto immunity. So you keep a small group of possibly autoreactivr immunity cell lines just in case. This is theorized to explain the prevalence of autoimmunity issues in the extremities being relatively common.
Some fundamental concepts that might fly over someone without a biology degree might include the absolutely fundamental requirement of protein binding for any biological process (akin to a transistors function for a computing device).
I'm thinking that step one of communicating the entire immune systems complexity is probably omission, of anything that's not absolutely required for comprehension of the basic concept. In that regard I'm not convinced there's any need for bringing up the innate system first (there's a reason we discovered it quite recently, perhaps?). Other details can also be similarly "omitted" for simplicity perhaps. What are your thoughts?