Short commentary
Ylli Përmeti
Abstract
The immune system is described by the medical literature as “the bodily system that protects the body from foreign substances, cells, and tissues by producing the immune response and that includes especially the thymus, spleen, lymph nodes, special deposits of lymphoid tissue (as in gastrointestinal tract and bone marrow), macrophages, lymphocytes including the bone marrow or B cells and thymus or T cells, and antibodies.i As a term, it has been used since 1919. But it has been established with the theory of the physician Macfarlane Burnet, for which he won a Nobel Price, “clonal selection”, which states that “an antigen entering the body does not induce the formation of an antibody specific to itself—as some immunologists believed—but instead it binds to one unique antibody selected from a vast repertoire of antibodies produced early in the organism’s life. As I will show hereafter, both these definitions are problematic. This is why they have led the medical community of our 20-21 century to use mainly vaccines and antiviral drugs against infections in order to slow or stop the virus from reproducing in the patient`s body, allowing the immune system to respond, shortening illness duration and halting progression to more severe forms of the disease. There is, in other words, one prevailing approach in the medical literature about the nature of the immune system which has gained insight from what it is while trying to show why it is as it is.