Next: COMPLEX IMMUNOLOGY
Up: Table of contents
Previous: Complex BIOLOGY

The immune system (IS) is a complex system whose function is critical to health: The IS protects the individual from infectious diseases, and possibly from tumors, yet the IS can cause autoimmune diseases, allergies and the rejection of grafted organs. Thus, understanding how the IS works and how it can be controlled, turned specifically on or off, is critical to health.

Indeed, the recent emergence of new Infectious agents, like HIV, and the spread of antibiotic resistance requires new approaches to vaccine development. The increase in incidence of autoimmune diseases also calls attention to the need for a better understanding of the IS. Hence, any increased understanding of the IS might have important applications.

On the basic level, study of the IS for the past half century has succeeded in characterizing the key cells, molecules, and genes that combine to form the IS. The successful reduction of the IS to its microscopic component parts, however, has not provided us with the ability to understand the macroscopic behavior of the IS. The problem is that the reduction of the IS to its fundamental building blocks has not clarified how the complex behavior of the IS emerges from the interactions of these building blocks. The IS, for example, exhibits the cognitive faculties of self-organization, learning, memory, interpretation, and decision making in the deployment of its forces, for good or bad. Indeed, the IS provides an outstanding example of the emergence of unexpectedly complex behavior from a relatively limited number of components interacting in known patterns. In short, understanding the emergence of immune cognition is an intellectual challenge with the potential to solve very practical problems.

Next: COMPLEX IMMUNOLOGY
Up: Table of contents
Previous: Complex BIOLOGY