The pandemic has turned us all into armchair immunologists, rhapsodizing about T cells and antibodies with the ardor once reserved for — well, anything else.
So, the timing was fortuitous for Philipp Dettmer to release his first book, “Immune,” in November, as covid-19 continued to lash the globe. Dettmer, 36, who lives in Munich, is the founder of the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt — German for “in a nutshell.” It’s one of the platform’s most popular science channels, with nearly 18 million subscribers who tune into colorful, animated videos on topics such as black holes, what dinosaurs really looked like and the origin of consciousness.
In “Immune,” a 300-plus-page book with striking illustrations, Dettmer turns his focus to the cells and chemicals that make up the immune system. Dettmer makes difficult ideas accessible by explaining them in lively ways: “Bacteria are among the oldest living things on this planet and have been partying for billions of years,” he writes. “They are the smallest things we can consider alive without getting a headache.”
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Dettmer isn’t a medical doctor or an epidemiologist. In “Immune,” he describes himself as “a science communicator and immune system enthusiast.” He credits a team of experts with fact-checking the book and answering his questions. For the most part, he gets it right, says Daniel M. Davis, a professor of immunology at the University of Manchester in England and the author of three immune-system books. “Philipp is really gifted in getting to the crux of things and boiling it down to the essence, and then translating those details into wonderful, colorful metaphors,” Davis says. Dettmer’s style aims for mass appeal — and, indeed, his book sold 100,800 copies in the United States, as of the week ending Jan. 29, according to NPD BookScan.
During a video interview, Dettmer talked about his book’s journey to publication and what we still need to learn about immunity.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity).
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Q: How did the book come about?
A: At first I worked on it just for myself, then tried to see if anyone wanted to publish the book — but nobody was interested. Then, in 2020, I got probably the fastest book contract anyone has ever gotten. When the pandemic hit, I contacted an agent and about two weeks later, I had a contract.
Q: Do you have a favorite chapter in “Immune” or something you learned that you found to be the most fascinating?
A: I’m very proud that in the end, I managed to explain a process that’s usually even hard for university students to understand.
And I have a favorite story inside the book. It’s the story of the neutrophil, a type of white blood cell that’s like an immune-system soldier. You make around 100 billion of these cells every day. It’s basically called into action when you have an infection anywhere, and this soldier is very aggressive. In the book, I describe it as “a chimp on coke with a bad temper and a machine gun.” And [these] cells have one thing they can do that’s just insane: Like a little suicide bomber, they can explode themselves. And what they do is they take all of their DNA and unfold it, and spit out the DNA as a huge net that’s spiked with all these chemicals that are dangerous and deadly to bacteria and viruses. And they basically try to make physical barriers with themselves that kill enemies.
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The amazing thing is that sometimes the neutrophils survive that process, and for a time, they can fight on. But they don’t have DNA anymore, so what even are they? Are they zombies?
Q: As a science communicator, how much does the misinformation circulating about covid-19 worry you?
A: It has all sorts of horrible consequences for the coherence of society. In the next 10 years, or the next 30, we’ll see them. Like with measles, you need a very high vaccination rate to get herd resistance and herd immunity, and if 10 percent of people now decide not to vaccinate against measles, we have a problem. That stuff worries me much more than covid — the long-term effects of skepticism.
Q: What do people tend to get wrong about the immune system?
A: For a lot of people, it feels like an energy field that you can charge or something, and that makes people very susceptible to all sorts of bad ideas. Once you understand that it’s not a thing, but a system — like a great orchestra that works together — you realize you can’t just pop an immune-boosting pill to fix things. During the pandemic, a popular orange juice in Germany had an “immune boost” added to it. What does that even mean? There’s also the idea of a “strong immune system” that I really don’t like. This idea works well in our self-improvement culture, but in reality, you don’t want an immune system that’s so strong that it smashes everything, including things your body needs. You want a calm immune system that always reacts with the correct level of force to defeat an unwanted intruder.
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Q: I know you were recently sick, and I’m curious what that experience is like for you after writing a book about the immune system.
A: It gives me a big, calm feeling. It’s like in a horror movie, when the evil monster is very creepy if you don’t see it properly, if it stays in the dark. But once the monster is revealed, and pulled into the light, it gets less creepy. And that’s how I feel about being sick. When you’re not able to see clearly what’s happening, that’s unpleasant. But if you know that when you have joint pain and body aches, that’s your immune system working, it’s much more reassuring.
Angela Haupt is a freelance writer and health editor.
Immune
A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive
Random House. 368 pp. $35
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