Hi Sebastien,

I liked your comparison. It evoked in my mind a concept in biology that is "patterns in nature". Many biological mechanisms follow patterns. In the case you mention, you noticed a pattern between two different scientific disciplines. I am sure you can find other disciplines that share the same pattern.

I guess it's a matter of how we see and understand things. This can be an advantage in the understanding of nature surrounding us, but can also be a limitation of the human brain.

Thank you for bringing a bit of philosophy to the Q&A sessions!

Cheers,

Paulo

Hallo Sebastien,

I like very much this disscussion and share the Paulo's point of view. From my perspective I would consider the memory cells as these undeletable parts of the hard-drive. Acutally, in excess they might even poise the (immune) system by limiting its diversity. They compete for a "niche" with other, perhaps more diverse (by repertoire) and if the system is taken away for an exotic trip (like often happens with our notebooks), they would be totally useless because no appropriate challenge would be encountered in a new environement. So, perhaps they are simply a long term investment (a backup?) in our future provided we don't change our environement. They might potentially be useful in those times where the supply of freshly generated, diverse cells is low and one should defend the organism with what is available based on the past experiance.

all the best,

Arek

Very good comparison, though I would think that memory cells are created AFTER a change to the immune system not before, because we don't essentially back up to an earlier time-point with memory, we are storing something new for later use.

I would think of immune memory as cached data, cookies and temp internet files stored after a browse... our immune system detects a lot of antigenic information and stored pieces of it in the form of immune memory cells ready for re-loading the page (creating new effector cells) upon re-contact with the antigen.

In my oppinion "cookies" is an excellent comparison!

Thank you Natalie,

all the best,

Arek

This is a most enjoyable intellectual exercise. Provoked me to think of the patterns in nature. Surely they exist. What is also very relevant is patterns are more often in our minds as conceptual models we reuse. Human mind is inclined to find patterns, recognize deep logic; it craves for order in our thoughts and arranges concepts faster than necessary sometimes. It makes science a difficult collaboration between a speculating intuition and a control freak reason armed with statistics. I also like the comparison, and I mostly liked the out of the box thinking. But here is a thing – how about the strategy of rebooting the immune system by bone marrow transplantation. They already discussed this in AIDS treatment and I had a very smart mentor in one of my post doc explores who suggested we reset the cancer hijacked immune system as an immunotherapy strategy. A corollary of this analogy – during reboot the computer goes through the same routine of ordered activation of different systems. Does this happen after bone marrow transplantation – yes. What part of the Microsoft Windows typical mess ups treatable by reboot resemble immune system diseases and inadequacies treatable by bone marrow transplantation?

This is a very nice view and comparison of two systems. Provided that nothing in the environment changes this might work. However, there are mutations in many pathogens that require the immune system to progress and not reboot to a previous level. This is more like adding new components to the system and therefore it is not possible to go all the way back to the previous time point.

+1 to Natalie Stevens, cache and cookies are indeed excellent comparison!

We could even push further, saying that the web is actually a environment by itself, with billions computers (individuals) working on diverse OS (ethnic groups), using various browser (which have different susceptibility to various attacks) protected with different anti-virus (where databases might represent forms of memory from previous acquired Ag experience and vaccination). Some teams have actually applied real epidemiologic methods to study computer viruses spreading.!

Rebooting the immune system is an interesting idea although it may induce in humans the same issues as for formatting computers: Big loss of data. By doing this, you will loose all acquired immunity and thus, be closed to newborns in terms of protection. You also re-install your computer out of an internet connection most of the time, that would be difficult at a scale of livings. We however, use depleting mAb therapy to treat poised immune response. You may use Rituximab to deplete B cells when some autoreactive clones became activated. This is like formatting partitions on your computer without affecting the entire hard drive.

I do agree totally with Paulo Bettencourt and Anastas Pashov about the patterns in nature. We have much to learn about other disciplines. These type of comparison have actually been advanced by others long before. N.K. Jerne thought about the similarities between the immune and the nervous system. It is indeed striking how neurons summarize a bunch of activator and inhibitory signals (post synaptic potentials) and interpret it in a response. What are doing immune cells if not just the same. The complexity is greater, sure, but each cells receive + and - informations, interpret it, and react in consequence. Moreover, it is very interesting to see how both system (Nervous and Immune) interact with each others. There is a very nice focus in Nature 2012 issue 15 about it. Perhaps we are studying these "two" systems separately because it is easier, but we might find one day that the neuroimmune system is only one system.

Thank you all for these exiting comments!

This is very nice comparative question which says that biology (immunology) reproduced informatics. This is the basis on which we animals avoid any shot of infections. Based on the informations about the invaders in the area defense police attack on them either to kill or eliminate name from the area or site of infection. We can compare this information as informer sitting on the boarder and getting information about the outsider who has entered or suppose to enter into the body where first body's defense cells fight like police deployed at the border. If the intruders get entry second set of defense mechanism adaptive get activated. Immune system is like defense system and informatics is signaling pathway. I think this is very good conceptual question asked by Sebastine.