How did people(possibly scientists or doctors) discover how our immune system worked? Eg how they sent wbc to fight.
In: Biology
Just to add, I work in an immunology lab, and while we are of course doing modern things, I think it might still be helpful to your question. We start by drawing blood samples from either mice or human volunteers, depending on the experiment. We use lab techniques to isolate different cells in different layers. Once we get the type of white blood cell that we want, we can grow those cells in a dish and experiment with different conditions. We can throw a bunch of different molecules at them that would found in the normal body environment and see how they react. Some molecules activate them and get them ramped up, while other molecules don’t really cause much of a response. Our main focus is cancer immunotherapy (basically getting a cancer patient’s immune system to clear out the cancer), so we also like to test out the ability of the cells we have isolated to attack cancer cells. We also have techniques to isolate and analyze individual proteins in the immune system. But that’s where things get very complicated very fast.
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