“You see the problem.”
Reality is a marvel, but it disguises this fact dismayingly well. One of its most convincing disguises is tedium threaded with horror. You’re sitting on a couch, waiting on hold with customer service to discuss a product you now regret buying while reading on your grubby laptop about a mass shooting. Marvelousness is not in sight.
The problem is one of scale. Zoom far enough out from that dismal couch (the whirling cosmos, the timescale of galaxy formation), or far enough in (the Busby Berkeley musical of mitosis, the spaciousness of the atom), and wonder reasserts itself. I am a zoomer-inner, and lately my great aid in this endeavor has been Lauren Sompayrac’s How the Immune System Works.
Sompayrac’s book is — much more than most books I write about — emphatically not for everyone. It’s not quite a textbook, but it bears enough resemblance to one (color-coded diagrams, electron microscope images of macrophages) that it risks provoking a certain high-school-biology torpor in some. It’s written in strenuously clear and approachable prose, and its subject is relevant to everyone who has ever walked the Earth (or lain sick in bed) — but still. I am, in this essay, waving around the key to my vault of astonishment. My point is not that this key will unlock your vault as well — it’s that your own key is well worth finding.
In any event: let’s look at Sompayrac’s locksmithery.
Early on she’s describing the work — the predicament — of B cells. These are the cells in your body that produce antibodies (such as the COVID-specific antibodies that circulate in your blood after you’ve had the vaccine).
“Interestingly, although antibodies are very important in the defense against invaders, they really don’t kill anything. Their job is to plant the ‘kiss of death’ on an invader — to tag it for destruction.
This is clear enough — chatty, jargon-free — but watch what she does next.
If you go to a fancy wedding, you’ll usually pass through a receiving line before you are allowed to enjoy the champagne and cake. Of course, one of the functions of this receiving line is to introduce everyone to the bride and groom. But the other function is to be sure no outsiders are admitted to the celebration. As you pass through the line, you will be screened by someone who is familiar with all the invited guests. If she finds that you don’t belong there, she will call the bouncer and have you removed. She doesn’t do it herself — certainly not.”
This is the essence of Sompayrac’s style — memorable, funny, conversational. Her book feels not so much written as transcribed (really don’t… fancy wedding… ). She writes not to be admired, but to be understood.
And yet she doesn’t — as I would be sorely tempted to do — linger in the kiddie pool of colorful analogies. She plunges into the bracing depths.
Because B cells, with their need to make antibodies for every conceivable invader, are up against a fiendish problem. Every virus, every bacteria, every fungus and splinter and drop of insect saliva — they all demand unique antibodies. B cells must, Sompayrac says, keep on hand approximately 100 million kinds of antibodies. But we only have, in our entire genome, a total of 25,000 genes. “You see the problem.”
I love this You see the problem. It respects us enough to presume our understanding (Of course we see the problem!), but it acknowledges, with its trail-marker-in-the-forest simplicity, the possibility that we might be lost (You see why that’s a problem, right?). It’s a companion’s casually extended forearm as we make our way over rocky ground — there if we need something to hold onto, unimposing if we don’t.
And this rocky ground turns out to be well worth traversing. Because what B cells have figured out, Sompayrac explains, is ingenious. In nearly all of our cells, the DNA passes unchanged from parent cell to offspring — every new hair cell has exactly the same DNA as the hair cells already on your head.
But B cells do something startling: they chop up and reshuffle their own DNA (“Once Mother Nature gets a good idea, she uses it over and over — and modular design is one of her very best ideas.”). And so antibodies are unbound by the genome’s limited vocabulary. B cells, owning only a copy of The Joy of Cooking, have invented scissors and glue — and are thus able to stitch together recipes for everything from Dal Makhani to Pad Krapow.
The cleverness of this solution — and the fact that our immune systems came to it without guidance, through the unfathomably slow accumulation of accidents — always strikes me, for some reason, as hilarious. The busy brilliance of our bodies! The microscopic Boeing factories humming away in us at all hours of the day and night!
This is also a place where the fascination of zooming in converges with the solace of zooming out. What time it must have taken B cells to solve this puzzle! You can hold the staggering intricacy of the immune system in your hand like a piece of petrified wood; the vastness of time is condensed in it.
B cells cut and paste our DNA so that our immune systems can protect us so that we can stay alive. And staying alive is not much helped — in fact it’s probably hindered — by awe (Look at the sheen on that lion’s fur!). Anxiety, longing, dread, preoccupation — these are the components of our emotional immune systems. They protect us from complacency; they keep us on our toes. And they make the glories of existence — the reasons that we might actually want to stay alive — difficult to access. You see the problem.
Dear Ben, I have been a devoted fan of your work ever since I read your piece on "I Am That"--my desert island book. I would love to send you a copy of my novel, What Jonah Knew, just out from Harper. The book is a little hard to categorize. It's nominally a psychological thriller, but is really about what I've gleaned during my 30+ years of Buddhist practice, which in recent years has veered more toward the nondual teachings of Ramana Maharshi, as well as Nisargadatta and others. You can check it out on my website and if you're interested, please email me and I'll send you a copy. Thank you for the work you do. www.barbaragrahamauthor.com