You are not a person, you are a planet, made of roughly 40 trillion cells.
There is so much of you, that if your cells were human-sized,
you would be as big as 20 Mount Everests. For your creepy-crawly inhabitants, this makes your body an
ecosystem, rich in resources and warmth and space. A perfect place to move into and have a family.
While some of these guests are welcome, most are not. Your immune system is the guardian
of this planet, the force tasked with protecting yourself against the constant danger of invasion.
Unfortunately your enemies in the tiny world have a huge advantage.
Consider the effort it takes to make a single copy of yourself and your trillions of cells. First you
need to find someone who thinks you are cute, date and be awkward and if things work out in a
complicated dance, two of your cells merge together. Then you need to wait for months
while the cell multiplies over and over until it is released into the world as a human being.
And even then you only have a mini copy that needs years to become remotely useful.
A bacterium consists of one cell. It can make a fully grown copy in about half an hour.
A virus can turn into hundreds within hours and billions within days.
Your enemies multiply orders of magnitude faster than you.
Even worse, for a bacterium or virus your body is a hostile ecosystem
applying selective pressure. Because they go through so many generations so quickly, eventually
by pure chance, there will be an individual that mutates and adapts in just the right way
to resist your defenses and then multiply quickly again. In other words, you are facing a sheer
endless variety of different enemies and you’re too slow to keep up with their evolution.
This is bad.
Luckily your immune system is just about the most amazing thing ever. The second most
complex biological system known to us, after the human brain, and so sophisticated that we still
haven’t discovered all its secrets. Since it is so complicated we have to simplify and focus on
one thing at a time. If you want the full story, wait for the announcement at the end of the video!
Ok, so why are we not all killed by some new bacteria or virus? In a nutshell,
you actually have two immune systems, the innate and the adaptive immune system.
The innate immune system was ready when you were born.
It mostly consists of general purpose soldiers, we introduced them in the last immune video.
The adaptive immune system carries two types of cells T Cells and B Cells that are your super
weapons and are incredibly effective and deadly for your enemies. These cells are complicated to
produce and take a lot of time to deploy but once they are ready, they pack a real punch.
What makes your adaptive immune system so powerful is that it has the largest
library in the universe. It has an answer to everything. You have at least one of these
super weapon cells inside you to fight the black death, the corona virus and the first
deadly bacteria that will emerge in a city on Mars in one hundred years. This makes it
possible for you to counter the ability of bacteria and viruses to change so rapidly.
How is this possible? To understand what is going on here, we need to take one step back.
All organisms on earth are made from the same basic parts,
mostly proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of life
and can have billions of different shapes - you can imagine them as 3D puzzle pieces.
There are billions of different puzzle pieces your enemies can use to construct their bodies.
Why is this important? Because proteins are in a way the “language” of the microworld.
Cells don’t have eyes or ears, so to tell friend from foe, they have to touch them and recognize
if their protein is part of a friend or part of an enemy. Recognizing means that cells have countless
tiny devices called receptors, that are able to connect with a specific protein puzzle piece.
So your cells have tiny puzzle pieces on their outsides that are able to click together,
or recognize other protein puzzle pieces. When a cell connects together with a protein
and recognizes it as “enemy”, it knows that it has to attack.
Only if your cells can make this distinction between friend or foe
is your immune system able to fight an invader.
But since there are billions of possible protein puzzle pieces,
this means there are billions of possible enemy puzzle pieces. This is also one of the reasons
we still have to deal with diseases like the flu each year – the influenza virus mutates
very rapidly and so the proteins that make up its hull constantly change a tiny bit.
The soldiers of your innate immune system have a large number of the puzzle pieces for common
bacteria and viruses memorized, that’s why they are your all purpose weapons. But they are
ineffective against many billions of mutations and adaptations that your enemies can develop.
So the reason you are still alive is that your Adaptive immune system is able to recognize
between one billion and ten billion different enemy protein puzzle pieces, which is enough
to be prepared for every possible enemy. But how is this possible? How could your immune
system possibly have this much of a variety to be prepared for every possible protein puzzle piece?
Well, the cells of your adaptive immune system found a cheat code: mixing and matching their own
genetic code to create this stunning variety of receptors. The details are way too complicated for
this video but in a nutshell, your adaptive immune cells have official permission to take a tiny part
of their own genetic code and mix it in random ways to create billions of different receptors.
A good way to explain this is by asking you to imagine an army of cooks, with each
of them wanting their own special recipe. They have 100 different ingredients to choose from.
Each ingredient stands for one tiny piece of genetic code in this metaphor.
So each cook takes a few random ingredients and randomly mixes them together.
Maybe Tomato, Chicken, Rice and half an onion as entree,
Marshmallow, Pepper, Strawberries and a quarter banana as a dessert.
Or Cucumber, Beef, Potatoes and two carrots,
and blueberries, chocolate and cream with a pinch of cinnamon.
Even with slight variation and with only 100 ingredients,
there are billions of possible recipes. And likewise, with just a small selection
of gene fragments, your cells create billions of receptors. The details of this are so cool
that they should get their own video – or their own chapter in a book. In any case,
by mixing up gene fragments, you get up to ten billion different combinations. So in the end,
you get billions of immune cells, and each of them has one specific and unique receptor – the
dish from our metaphor – that is able to recognize one specific protein puzzle piece.
In total, you end up with at least one cell for every enemy that could possibly exist.
But here we run into a pretty dangerous problem – if your adaptive immune system is making
weapons that can attack every possible protein puzzle piece in the universe…
wouldn’t it also make some that can attack your own cells? Yes, it happens all the time.
This is so fundamentally dangerous to your survival that you have a whole
organ that does nothing but work on preventing this: The Murder University of your Thymus.
Your Thymus is a chicken wing sized organ above your heart and you've probably never heard of
it. Interestingly, your thymus is one of the reasons why your immune system weakens as you age,
because it is in a constant state of decline once you reach puberty. But what does the Thymus do?
In your murder university, your immune system is putting your adaptive immune cells
through an intense and deadly curriculum. Basically it is showing them all sorts of
protein puzzle pieces that are used by your own cells to see how they react.
When a young cell recognizes a body puzzle piece and wants to attack it, the teacher cells order
them to kill themselves and they are eaten up and recycled. The immune system is so particular
about this process that around 98% of your adaptive immune cells that enter murder university
die there. 2% graduate and get to do their job of protecting you for real.
If this process goes wrong and cells escape that can recognize your own protein puzzle pieces,
this can lead to autoimmune disease, where your immune system attacks your own body
from the inside. Andt this, again is another story for another time.
Ok, let us summarize. Your immune system has two parts, one that defends you right after
birth and one that carries the largest library of superweapons in the universe
but needs to boot up first. To create billions of different superweapons, your adaptive immune
cells recombine a part of their genetic code to create a breathtaking variety of attack weapons.
Then they enter a murder university that only 2% survive to make sure they do not attack you. And
then you end up with billions of different cells, that in total are able to protect you against
every possible enemy in the universe. Now wait a second. If this is all true,
why do we get sick at all? Why was a new disease like Covid-19 able to kill millions of people?
Well everything we just learned about is just a tiny, tiny window into the amazing struggle for
life and death that plays out every day inside your body and there are so many amazing details
and questions here: How does your body actually find the right cell in time to protect you?
How do your enemies fight back and overcome your immune system anyway?
And what about all the things that did not fit in this video?
Well, today finally marks the release of “Immune – A Journey Into the Mysterious System that Keeps
You Alive”, written by Philipp Dettmer, the founder and head writer of Kurzgesagt.
First we had to push the release back because of cargo trouble and then because so
many of you pre-ordered that we didn’t have enough copies for the original launch day!
Thank you so, so much for that!
Immune tells the epic story of your immune system and will forever change
how you think about your own body, how you experience being sick and healthy.
The book is written to be as fun and easy to grasp as Kurzgesagt videos but it is able to dive way
deeper iinto its subject. So go on a journey through the hidden microverse within yourself.
Witness deadly wars between billions of invaders and cells, learn how your immune system actually
works and protects you from cuts, cancer and Covid. Never before have we so urgently needed
to learn about how immunity works. Immune is fun and great to look at and it even smells good.
Follow the link in the description to order it today.
This is the end of a decade-long personal journey working on this,
thank you all so, so much for your support. And thank you for watching. And reading.