Immunology: The last class of my first year
Posted by enrico | Under Medical School Friday Jun 16, 2006[Due to internet and power outages, as well as the final for this class, I am backposting the next two posts to Friday and Saturday, although they were written from Thursday to Saturday. --e]
Immunology is one of those subjects that kinda scared me more than usual. We breezed through immuno in histology doing lymphoid tissue in class, leaving most of us like, “Huh? What the hell was that?!” until we read the appropriate chapter(s) in the textbook. Even then, I at least, was still more than fuzzy. We covered aspects again in general pathology when we went over autoimmune diseases and again, it was a topical treatment, leaving a lot of same questions I had before.
To help with the non-medical readers (and to remind graduated physicians of the ick they had to endure their preclinical years), here is an example of some of the cryptic nature of immunology: a movie on the complement system. Naming things one letter + the number in the order it was found does not exactly give immunologists the distinction of being creative. Couldn’t they have better names than C1q, C5a, or C3bBb?
But I had a very positive immuno experience, I’m happy to say. I still think it’s an amazingly difficult subject to be sure, but once I took the time to really learn it, I appreciated all the molecular mechanisms, the biochemistry, the mind-boggling numbers involved (over 1015 possible gene recombination events!), I look back and am thankful I took the time to tackle it head-on instead of just saying, “Oh, that subject is not for me.”
The meat of immuno is not memorizing IL-2, IL-10, CD28, B7.1, Fas, Lck, src, and all that jazz, it’s understanding what gets turned on, what gets turned off, how lymphocytes respond to various signals, how lymphocytes affect other cells and tissues, all to finally understand the complexity the body goes through to defend itself. Everything meets that bottom line in a normal individual. Once you “get” what’s going on and the dependencies involved, then you, with time remaining, set out to memorize details like the above for a test. The goal is to understand the fundamentals and let the chips fall where they may with respect to a silly grade based on a professor’s personal picadillos of importance.
And that leads me to the next post which I’ve been chewing on for some time: lessons learned regarding studying in the first year of med school.