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As biologists, we contemplate with admiration and awe the wondrous array of sophisticated cell interactions and recognitions evolved in the T cell immune system, which must be a model for other similarly complex biological systems of highly differentiated organisms.

If we think of the immune system as a machine, then we are far from even knowing all of its parts.

The immune system has evolved the capacity to react specifically with a very large number of foreign molecules with which it had no previous contact while avoiding reactivity for autologous molecules, naturally antigenic in other species or in other individuals of the same species.

The body's immune system is like any other system of the body. Each of them have their vital function for the human host.

The immune system's goal is to protect the body against invaders either from without, such as microbes, or from within, such as cancers and different types of neoplastic transformation.

The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.

What the immune system of man has in its advanced development is what we call immunological memory, so that once it sees something for the first time, when it sees it the second or the third time, it can respond against it in a way that's much more accelerated than when it sees it for the first time.

Investigating rare diseases gives researchers more clues about how the healthy immune system functions.

My idea right from the beginning, I guess, was to dismantle the immune system one gene at a time so we could track the mutations that cause problems.

We found out that, contrary to what many people thought, in the immune system, genes can change during the life cycle of the individual.