The humor writer Andy Borowitz recently wrote,

There is a deep-seated fear among some Americans that an Ebola outbreak can make the country turn to science,

which rivaled an onion article titled,

Experts Say, Ebola Vaccine, at least 50 white people away.

So maybe starting off part two on this topic of Ebola with a focus on some

science will be a good place to start today. Let's talk about Ebola and the immune system. Do you

remember from immunology what dendritic cells are? Those are not to be confused with dendrites

found on nerve cells. Dendritic cells come out of our bone marrow and search for viruses and

bacteria, and they are antigen-presenting cells that help T-cells respond to foreign antigens.

So dendritic cells are found in lymph nodes. They also circulate in the blood,

and they are also present in some other areas of the body as well. These dendritic cells were first

described by Paul Langerhans in the late 19th century, but the central role of dendritic cells

in the adaptive immune response was described by a guy named Ralph Steinman in 1973, and he would receive the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 2011 for that work on the immune system.

And by the way, the day the email arrived on his cell phone that he got the Nobel

Prize award would have been very exciting for him. The problem was he had just died of a four-year

battle with pancreatic cancer. But these dendritic cells are very important, and several studies have

been showing that Ebola virus attacks

these dendritic cells early. That's a bummer of a situation that hampers the immune response.

It appears that one of the great determining factors as to whether or not you survive

Ebola is whether your immune system eventually starts making

antibodies against the virus. Therefore, the early attack on dendritic cells is like a country's

radar and the entire computer system being wiped out before a full-scale invasion. Dendritic

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