YOU WON’T BE IMMUNE TO CHARM OF THIS GEM

The Beautiful Cure: Harnessing Your Body’s Natural Defences Daniel M Davis Bodley Head €28 ★★★★★

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you,’ wrote Roald Dahl, ‘because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.’

Daniel M Davis, professor of immunology at the University of Manchester, quotes Dahl in The Beautiful Cure, a heroic attempt to instil in readers a sense of childlike wonder at the universes explored by scientists studying the immune system.

His previous book, The Compatibility Gene, examined the genes that affect our responses to infections. The Beautiful Cure, he says, is about ‘the bigger picture: how and why the activity of our immune system varies, how it is regulated and directed, all of its component parts’.

The immune system, Davis explains, is where the body interacts with other organisms; where the mental interacts with the physical; and even where we are connected to the solar system, as our body changes according to the time of day.

Davis, a self-confessed ‘lab head’, describes how scientists’ curiosity leads us to the ‘frontier of knowledge’. He likens the process by which scientists ‘find their stories’ to that of a novelist who ‘flails around… searching for a plot that works’.

He gives us the human stories behind the scientific breakthroughs, such as that of Canadian immunologist Ralph Steinman, who discovered dendritic cells, which find a problem and then switch on the appropriate response in the immune system.

Davis says this was a ‘new consciousness of the human body’. Steinman unsuccessfully tried to use his discoveries to cure himself of cancer. Three days after he died, the Nobel committee, unaware of his death, told his family he had won a prize.

The Beautiful Cure is an inspirational book that not only reveals the ‘secret joys’ of scientific discovery but is jam-packed full of revelations for non-scientists, such as why some vaccines work better in the morning; why antibodies are the human body’s ‘magic bullets’; and how cells called neutrophils shoot out a sticky web of DNA and proteins to capture germs ‘like Spiderman’.