I know that a large part of organ transplants are if they’ll stick or get rejected, but why do they do that? I imagine if your body wants to live it’ll take what it can get so to outright refuse a new organ seems a little counterproductive unless there’s something inhibiting that.
In: Biology
> I imagine if your body wants to live
Your body is not sapient. It does not know anything other than what its DNA and proteins indicate. It does not understand the concept of “you need a liver in order to live,” because it doesn’t understand *anything at all.*
Instead, what the body sees is a lot of organic material with the wrong labels on it. Those labels are little chemical markers that bodies use to identify whether a material is “foreign” or not. Think of it like a dumb robot that can see in color really well, and knows the *exact* shade of green that identifies friendly targets from enemy targets. Enemies are ALL colors that aren’t the *exact* shade of green the robot knows. Suddenly, there’s a new target nearby, and it’s colored *spring* green when the robot is programmed to only recognize *shamrock* green. So the robot starts blasting, because the new target is not *exactly* the right color.
That’s what your immune system does. And it’s a good thing it does! Because there are lots of things (like cancer) that try to pretend to be the right color, and your immune system is *usually* able to detect and destroy them. Cancer becomes a problem when it figures out how to trick the robot, e.g. by sending a signal which turns off the “check for color” part of the robot’s code.
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