[extropy-chat] Training the immune system

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On May 27, 2006, at 2:21 PM, BillK wrote:
> On 5/27/06, Martin Striz wrote:
>> Indeed.  Jared Diamond, among others, suggests that it was trading
>> routes and exposure to many pathogens that gave the Europeans an
>> epidemiological advantage over Native Americans.
>
> That's called vaccination nowadays, isn't it?


Except that in the case of the Europeans the vaccination is passed  
down genetically, and for diseases for which a proper vaccine may not  
exist even today.  Europeans have a rather dirty genome with a rich  
set of mutations that confer resistance or immunity to a surprisingly  
broad range of pathogens, including many that we would not expect  
Europeans to have been exposed to.  The best known example is  
probably the prevalence of a mutation that confers resistance or  
outright immunity to HIV strains.  On the surface, one would expect  
such mutations to show up in African populations where exposure to  
that family of viruses is historically more common.

While there is much argument over precisely why this is more evident  
in European genomes than others, there is supposedly a fair amount of  
evidence in the genome that suggests pathogen resistance mutations  
were more important to the European genetic stock than others, hence  
it accumulated quite a few more.  Or at least, this is the current  
explanation for why the Europeans seemed to give more disease than  
they got -- they had more built-in resistance to pathogens they had  
not been directly exposed to.  All of which makes great fodder for  
disease research, since these mutations often suggest methods of attack.


J. Andrew Rogers