THE IMMUNE MYSTERY

An impressive account of an ambitious medical researcher and her struggles.

Raised in Britain, now living and working in Norway, Kåss watched her mother suffer from the debilitating effects of rheumatoid arthritis; she died when the author was in her early teens. After performing brilliantly in medical school, Kåss devoted her life to the study of autoimmune diseases, bravely stepping into a male-dominated field that garners far less attention than other areas of research. In the U.S., she writes, “health authorities have allocated ten times as much funding to cancer research as to research into autoimmune diseases.” Kåss delivers a lucid explanation of our complex immune system, which fiercely attacks germs and viruses when they enter the body but must tolerate other foreign substances such as food and medicine. Autoimmunity occurs when it mistakenly attacks the body it is supposed to protect, and women make up 80% of victims, in part because their immune system has the almost impossible task of ignoring an enormous foreign invader: a fetus. Autoimmune disease often begins around pregnancy. The author paints an eye-opening portrait of the grueling life of a clinical researcher: pleading for money, struggling with technical details, persuading patients to volunteer for a study that’s unlikely to help them, laboring for years, and trying to persuade skeptical journal editors to pay attention to her findings. The author’s discovery that blocking a certain brain hormone may relieve symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis has persuaded pharmaceutical companies to invest millions in large-scale testing; after five years, the results remain “promising.” Kåss concludes her engrossing book with a 50-page description of scores of diseases, from obscure to everyday (diabetes, colitis, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis), whose relations to autoimmunity range from proven to pure speculation, as well as a list of possible environmental causes ranging from gluten to UV radiation.

Good popular science combined with a moving memoir.