Peter Attia· MD
first of all frogs make an immune response and then how did monkeys making new responses so I was a am really an evolutionary biologist and then HIV came along and this is the most dramatic example of evolution is that I certainly have ever seen where the virus populations can change after infection in two weeks where the infecting virus can be essentially removed and a new virus appears under pressure from the immune response and then because of my roots in the West Indies I had the occasion to visit Brazil about twenty years ago and realized that I was back in the West Indies because of the neotropical fauna were exactly the same so I was back home and since then I've fallen in love with Brazil and learned how to speak Portuguese and now study many viruses that are tropical diseases like seeker and dengue so I guess that's how I came to develop my interest in tropical diseases well I share your love for Brazil though clearly not your ability to speak to language nor probably the frequency but you've been there but it is a place I hold very special and I'm very bummed to probably not be making a trip this fall there I was planning to take my wife potentially my daughter to Sao Paulo so I do look forward to getting back to Brazil though because I agree with you it is a very very special place on this planet by the way before we get into something I mean you said the evolutionary thing I a question popped into my mind that may or may not be relevant but just out of pure curiosity when you think about our evolution humans people point to the development of language as a big step function change in our development or developmental changes in the brain some of which of course enabled that change in language or standing upright all of these various things that represented not just linear but sort of logarithmic changes again not that they occurred very quickly in real time over a log scale they look to have occurred more quickly what was the biggest change in the evolution of the immune system as you studied it I think probably the advent of the adaptive immune response because many many different animals have innate immune responses that are incredibly important but the evolution of T and B cells that then allowed the immune system to have create a memory to respond to pathogens and in the end is the basis for vaccination which as you know is the public health measure that is saved more human lives than any other public health measure so yeah probably the adaptive immune response and of course that's what I'm interested in - it's a little bit of bias here well when did that take place how long ago did we acquire that out of just the innate system we certainly know that amphibians have T and B cells and make antibody responses and T cell responses so this occurred well before that branch of the animal kingdom that's amazing I actually would not have guessed that I would have guessed it was more recent than that but that's pretty impressive and it speaks to obviously the importance of it so let's build off what you just said and give people a really good primer on immunology I love this topic as well David and I studied immunology but in a different lens I studied it through the cancer lens so mostly focused on the cellular branch of the adaptive system could you walk people through kind of a diagram that people might keep in their minds eye which says you first would bifurcate the immune system as innate and adaptive and then you would further bifurcate the adaptive system cellular and humoral so maybe talk about what those two branch points mean let's say people get infected with influenza virus so even coronavirus what happens is that the virus enters a cell through a reset and the virus can't replicate by itself and needs to get into that cell and replicate and then the virus starts replicating produces copies of itself which are sent out into the blood and infect other cells that infection event triggers the innate immune response there are sensors inside cells that will then trigger the production of interferons which will then start to turn on the immune system including the adaptive immune system and the adaptive immune system is it really has two major arms the T cells and the B cells I'm going to talk a little bit about the B cell response for a moment because that is what has really fascinated me