Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail. I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting today with Dr. Robert Clancy, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Newcastle. We are, of course, not sitting in the Dark Horse studio. I'm here in Texas for the premiere of a wonderful film that premiered last night. It is produced by Mickey Willis,

whose studio we are sitting in. It was directed by Matt Guthrie, who has arranged this setup

for us to podcast here in Texas. Dr. Clancy, welcome to Dark Horse. Thanks very much, Brett.

It's good to be here. Well, let me set the stage a little bit for my audience, many of whom will know

that years ago, as a freshman in college, I took a course. It was actually, I took it as a result

of some excellent advice given to me by my brother who told me, ignore the prerequisites,

take what seems interesting and important to you. So I took a course in immunobiology. It turned out to be one of the better

decisions of my life. The reality of immunology in the body and the way that it develops

is so utterly fascinating and important that I've never regretted a moment

that I've spent on it. However, during the COVID so-called pandemic, I came to understand

that there was a deficiency in what I thought I understood about immunology, and that deficiency

has to do with the way in which immunities are differentiated by

tissue, and in particular that there is something wrong with a model that imagines that you

are going to have something injected into your arm, be it a real vaccine or a gene therapy, and that's going to

produce a proper immunity to a respiratory infection that hits you in the mucosa. So it turns out

you are an expert in exactly that interface, the mucosal interface and the immunity that develops

there. And I'm hoping that you will help me and the audience understand

what takes place there and what impact it has on the way we should protect our health

from infection. Right. You're absolutely right. And I think with the COVID pandemic, that was a

central problem that people making decisions at many levels didn't

understand the biology of infection of an airway. To make it very simple, there are two main

immunological systems. There's the one that everyone knows about that keeps the body sterile. You don't want

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