The human body has 1.8T cells dedicated to defending it
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Also, many immune factors that people thought were restricted to particular compartments or cell types have been found in "non-immune" cells. For example, complement protein was thought to be a blood factor that is only made in the liver, but it turns out that it is also made locally by stromal cells of the intestine:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.02.523770v1....
Not to mention the burgeoning field of neuroimmunology - there are neurons in the spleen which are in direct contact with macrophages and we don't know why (or at least didn't know why a few years ago when I learned about it). But avoiding people with disease symptoms could be considered part of the 'immune system.'
Another example of how almost any cell contributes to immunity is that depending on the way a cell dies (apoptosis vs pyroptosis vs necroptosis), it can release its contents, including nuclear proteins, and other "Damage-associated molecular patterns" which act as an inflammatory recruiter of other immune cells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damage-associated_molecular_pa...
For pyroptosis this includes endothelial cells, epithelial cells, neurons, heart muscle cells, liver cells, fibroblasts, and pancreatic β-cells.
On top of this, there are several ways that "non-immune" cells are constantly doing internal immune tasks, or performing 'citizens arrests' if you will, including: restriction factors, cellular stress response, autophagy, and viral RNA/DNA detection. For example, many "non-immune" cells express Toll-like receptors which are used to detect "Pathogen-associated molecular patterns".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogen-associated_molecular_...
I believe a real doctor made the series which explores how the human body works on a cellular level.
We might say this suggests that our bodies are about an order of magnitude more efficient and/or civilized than our societies, which seems conservative if anything, no?
Isn't 10¹² a trillion?
It depends on language more than metric/imperial.
Goes to show, one advantage of the mathematical notation is that it is closer to universal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Curren...
Spain, a large portion of Europe, and many Latin American countries use it.
All joking aside, National Geographic says there's about 37 trillion cells in a 70 kg (154 pounds) human body. So that'd mean 5% of those are dedicated to defending.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-many-...
If you are just a little bit interested i highly recommend the book "Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive" by Philipp Dettmer, the creator of Kurzgesagt. It's a really fun book to read and learn about your immune system.
For example: it counts 'blood cells'. But does that count all blood cells, or just those that fight disease like white blood cells?
Your skin is the first line-of-defense against disease.
So that "<3%" is doing a ton of work.
e.g. Is the percentage of mass or resource allocation to a body's immune system similar to that devoted to a nation state's military and police force? Do all complex systems naturally normalize on a similar percentage devoted to defense that maximizes resources going to non defense productivity without leaving the system too vulnerable to attack?
Is this already a formalized area of study?
The USA military is about 1.4M people which works out to about .4% of the population. Thats pretty close to the .2% in the study!
> "Maybe," he said. "But I don't see how things that hunt and kill human beings could be there among us without our knowing."
> [...] "You can check with the FBI. That's out of about three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year. It's been almost twenty years since you graduated? So that would mean that between forty and fifty people in your class are gone. Just gone. No one knows where they are."
> Butters shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "So?"
> [...] I let the silence stretch for a minute, just to make the point. Then I started up again. "Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators."
-- Dead Beat by Jim Butcher
No clue if the math works out. It took me a while to find it, I kept thinking it was from one of the Blade movies instead.
The resource devotion of most all nation states seems to settle in this 1-3% range, excluding those with more active security tensions. Ukraine for example running an absolute fever at 34% and Israel chronically stressed at 4.5%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
The middle east in general seems to over allocate on their immune system. This would actually align with what I've been reading recently that modern Islamic culture is much more of a physical might makes right system. And that overspend on aggression and displays of power is part of what hampers their economic vitality while the more peace loving west gets to devote more resources to non destructive pursuits. Turning the other cheek and meeting in the middle is seen as weakness in the Middle East, but it counter intuitively is the reason that the west is the stronger system.
Similarly, those who get their vaccines spend less time sick with their immune system inflamed, and so get to be more productive at work or athletic pursuits and compete better than those that abstain.
Edit: one of the core functions of the immune system is identifying and eliminating pre-cancerous cells from your own body, if you downvote this out of reflexive politics you are a clown.
It is not that serious... The emphasis that you yourself added is counterproductive to your point and deliberately precludes discussing viewpoints that would be valid because nobody wants to deal with a "hyper-reactive".
I'm sure this has nothing to do with centuries of western imperialism in that region.
When you include reservists (of varying quality) the cake goes to North Korea with 30% (!), but notably also Cuba (11%), Taiwan (7.8%), Israel (7.6%).
During WWII, many nations managed to cumulatively mobilize 10-15% of their population (about 9%, 16 million, for the USA).
The US is the third most populous country so its military is still exceptionally big in absolute terms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_...
This reads like a euphemism.
First, if you think Stalin wouldn't have taken his armies right to the Atlantic coast of France after crushing the Nazis, you'd be badly mistaken. It was specifically U.S. military power (and the atomic bomb) that stopped him from trying this. The rest of the allied powers were too exhausted and small to be credible deterrents.
After that, over the following decades on multiple occasions, the same thing applied, a major power, like the USSR or China was tacitly or openly stopped from taking things further or attacking more specifically because of US presence in the background. This applies to South Korea for sure, but also to many places in central Europe and elsewhere.
Today, the U.S. remains as the biggest deterrent of further Russian encroachment into places aside from those that it specifically considers its rightful domains (Ukraine, for example, where even foreign threats of retaliation couldn't stop a nationalistic sense of having the right to attack). I'd argue that this is one of the major reasons why Finland wasn't invaded long ago. (U.S. presence and the dawning realization among the Russian leadership that its supposedly strong remodernized military is much shittier, weaker and more corrupt than it was "supposed" to be.)
The US does spend more than average, but we're talking 3.5% vs the global average of 2.2% of GDP. So, the overwhelming might of the US military isn't because Americans are rapid warmongers, but because the US economy is the most productive per capita of all large countries by a massive margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
The US military isn't large in terms of personnel in uniform as a share of population, though.
My first thought was how software complexity imitates life.
I remember seeing a reference[1] that about 5-10% of all Windows operating system source code was dedicated to security in one sense or another, such as malware detection, cryptographic libraries, certificates, Defender, Bitlocker, UAC, all the complicated code for file permissions, privileges, authentication, etc.
[1] This is one of those things that is very difficult to Google for, and I haven't been able to find a reference to where I read it.
So estimating at 80 trillion cells per human, that puts our "defense spending" at around 2.2%, quite similar to nation state budgets.
Or at least, this is where the complexity of comparison gets out of hand.
Does that help?
I guess OP is commenting in a vague manner that those 1.8T cells might not be defending the body
Blood system, digestive system etc - yes, I can see those, or test for their physical existence. But the 'immune system' is just a concept, not actually a system of the same type as the others. It's a abuse of the term 'system' as it is typically used to describe a coherent and related set of anatomical 'bits'.
What's funny is that I think you're right but in the wrong direction. All of these individual systems are made up differences because they are inter-dependent.
So, in the body, you can see a digestive system, lymph system, etc. But there is no 'immune system' - its just an idea. Its a label without something to be assigned to.
On the adaptive immune system, this is a fun read:
The acquired immune system: a vantage from beneath https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15539148/
When you say "we live in a microbes world" this indicates one way to look at things. You can also approach things from different perspectives - eg engineering, chemistry, physics, politics, philosophy, etc - there are many approaches to any part of reality. While a different perspective might give an interesting angle, you do see that the underlying reality of 'the body' has not changed? And that it is a misuse of language to say and treat something is a physical thing, when it cannot be pointed at?
Making a term ('the immune system') broad and refusing to use an existing term ('the body') is, to me, a sort of trick to conjure something into an imaginary existence. To me, you are not saying something meaningful if you say 'the body' is 'the immune system'. Whereas you are saying something meaningful when you point at guts etc, and say 'this is the digestive system'.
This is not the case with the immune system, because this 'system' is just an idea. It cannot be pointed at or isolated, like other bodily systems. And yet it is treated as if it is real, but where is it?
You might as well use 'the body' as a term, rather than 'immune system' - the term is so broad, it is meaningless to me.