It's Monday, March 11th, 2019, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Andrei Viscontes.

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One of the areas in medicine that seems to be hitting the headlines a lot these days is our immune system.

We hear about it when we hear about people who have trouble with vaccines, who wonder about herd immunity.

We hear about the rise of allergies and children and how that might be related to an overactive immune system.

And we hear about how the immune system now is being harnessed to fight cancer,

which ultimately is an immune disease.

What we don't often hear about are the personal stories and how in the immune system can be

very individualized.

It is, of course, a product of genetics, but it's also a product of

experiences. And as the allergy situation shows, we now seem to think that the treatment

for extreme food allergies might eventually be seen with small doses that teach the immune

system something that it seems to have missed out on earlier in life.

And of course, that's exactly what vaccines do.

So to get to the heart of how personal stories of immune system function can help us

understand a general universal principle that can apply to all of us, we can turn to Matt Richtel,

...