we don't know a lot

Man, oh man, this surely isn't what I feel like blogging about. I feel like I've been in a chronically bad mood for the entirety of April. That may be my imagination, but it's true today, and so it makes all the previous days seem like they were probably like this, also. "Bad mood" isn't quite the accurate term - I've actually been in a GOOD mood most of the time, but I fret a lot. I am filled with many, many questions, mostly about my life and where I'm going and when. I am stressed about not having answers. And I want to spew it all here right now, but I think that's probably rather unwise. Plus, it's not very nice to read stuff like that, is it? :-)

So, what I'm going to be blogging about today is not that at all. It is about immunology.

At the end of March I attended a meeting about HIV for work (many lovely pictures are waiting to be transferred to the correct computer and posted onto this very blog; promise! Oh, and they're not pictures of HIV or any of that boring work-related stuff - they're of the area surrounding the conference center, which was anything but boring and was also very beautiful). One thing I am always amazed by when I leave an HIV meeting is how much scientists don't know. Not just about the HIV virus itself, not even about the immune response against HIV. Scientists just plain don't know much about the immune system period! It seems that the more we (meaning the scientific community immersed in HIV research) learn, the more we find we don't know. And while the microbial fuel cell is my number one choice for a future career at the present moment, the workings of the immune system is a close second.

I am guessing (hoping, since you all out there will have to read this!) that you don't have to be a scientist to find it interesting that depending on the origin of the "instructor" cells that interact with blood cells to tell them to fight disease, the fighting cells go fight in different places. That probably needs a bit more explanation. Okay... Basic immunology: we all have a bunch of cells floating around in our bodies doing different stuff. "Instructor" cells (technically called "dendritic cells") have the main duty of picking up stuff, figuring out if it's bad, and then telling certain blood cells (e.g. T cells) that the bad thing is there and they should fight it when they run into it. What's new and neat in the field of immunology is that it kind of appears that not only do the instructors say "Bad thing exists!" but "Bad thing exists in a certain location - now GO THERE and attack it!" For example, if you take an instructor cell from the skin and mix it with a fighting cell, the fighting cell goes to the skin. But, if you take and instructor cell from the intestine and mix it with the same fighting cell...now the fighting cell goes to the intestine! It doesn't matter where the fighting cell comes from, all that seems to matter is the instructor cell.

I think that's pretty cool. The rather troubling part is that nobody knows why any of this happens or even if it happens in any other body parts than the intestine and the skin. I happen to really like the intestinal immune system, so I don't really care, but surely it would be intriguing to find out if this happens in other tissues (and if not...why not!?). Did you ever realize that nobody even really knows the details about how to properly stimulate cells to fight off the bacteria, viruses, and parasites that try to attack your body every day.

Yet the body does it quite well. For even though I was sick last week for a few days...the rest of the 360 days of the year I've been fine! Truly that means on only ONE day a respiratory virus was able to get past all the barriers my body has up - and that's a protection success rate of greater than 99.7%! (Hm, come to think of it, that's way better than most birth control methods... Not that this means anything, and not that pregnancy is something you "catch" like a cold! I'm just saying...the body does a good job!)

Oh my, now this is going somewhere I never intended. I think I'll stop and get back to work!

So...moral of the story: we scientists might seem (and certain ones will attempt to convince people of this!) like we're smart and all that, but really, we have NO idea.