A. J. Jacobs Quotes

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.

Most germs aren't bad. You're in a microbial environment all the time.

As it takes two to make a quarrel, so it takes two to make a disease, the microbe and its host.

I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally, the new immunology was born.

Autoimmunity is probably the next frontier. The majority of cases of autoimmune disease result from a complex genetic problem that has environmental influences. It is a colossal task for the immune system to maintain tolerance to self and yet be ready to react to everything in the world around us.

As biologists, we contemplate with admiration and awe the wondrous array of sophisticated cell interactions and recognitions evolved in the T cell immune system, which must be a model for other similarly complex biological systems of highly differentiated organisms.

It's my personal opinion, and I'm not espousing it to anybody else, I think your immune system and how healthy you are determines how you react to any excess of any kind.

When an animal is infected, either naturally or by experimental injection, with a bacterium, virus, or other foreign body, the animal recognises this as an invader and acts in such a way as to remove or destroy it.

My interest was directed, from my medical student days, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity. I had suffered from bronchial asthma as a child and had developed a deep curiosity in allergic phenomena.

The right raw materials can... double or triple the protective power of the immune system.

There exist thousands of Americans who have AIDS-defining diseases but are HIV negative.

The nature of a protective immune response to HIV is still unclear. Because in a very, very unique manner, unlike virtually any other microbe with which we're familiar, the HIV virus has evolved in a way that the immune system finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with the virus.

The 20th-century ulcer epidemic was a sign of good health in American people - good diet, strong acidity and healthy immune response actually make ulcers more likely. That's why businessmen eating giant T-bone steaks were prone to ulcers.

I always used to develop a cold going into the studio.

When you vaccinate someone, or when you get infected, the microbe is presenting itself to the immune system in a way that the immune system recognizes the important elements of the microbe and makes an immune response, both an antibody response and a cellular response, to ultimately contain the microbe.

Disease is a vital expression of the human organism.

You can find bacteria everywhere. They're invisible to us. I've never seen a bacterium, except under a microscope. They're so small, we don't see them, but they are everywhere.

Inflammation as understood in man and the higher animals is a phenomenon that almost always results from the intervention of some pathogenic microbe.

The immune system has evolved the capacity to react specifically with a very large number of foreign molecules with which it had no previous contact while avoiding reactivity for autologous molecules, naturally antigenic in other species or in other individuals of the same species.

Many key concepts concerning the nature of immunity have originated from the very practical need to control virus infections.

I do not shake hands from a sanitary standpoint.

All infections, of whatever type, with no exceptions, are products of parasitic beings; that is, by living organisms that enter in other living organisms, in which they find nourishment, that is, food that suits them, here they hatch, grow and reproduce themselves.

The Europeans liked to believe it was their valor, superior weapons and culture that won the New World. The real conquistadors were the armies of pathogens that raced on ahead to infect and kill 9 out of 10 of all the Indians of North, Central, and South America. The civilizations of the New World crumbled under the onslaught of invading microbes. Without this invisible army, Cortez and those who followed might never have stood a chance.

I'm recovering from a cold. I'm so full of penicillin that, if I sneeze, I'll cure someone.

A small cold and cough can actually stop you from going where you are.