Sam writes:

Hello, TPH-5 (TWiX Podcast Hosts – 5th podcast in family)*

*I wanted to come up with a clever name refer to you, but I came up with nothing. But, since this is an immunology-related podcast, I figured I could just create a three-letter abbreviation, in which one of the letters itself was an abbreviation for something else, add a number, and I’d fit right in! (see, e.g. MR1)

Your podcast has recently discussed the phenomenon of joint first authors, and occasionally, joint second authors. I recently came across this article which has a single first author, but both joint second authors and joint third authors. I don’t know the field well enough to tell if this paper is sufficiently interesting to warrant either a full episode or a snippet, but the research highlight of this paper in Nature Reviews Immunology makes it seem like this is pretty groundbreaking. Anyway, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this paper, however you choose to present it.

As an aside, listening to this podcast and Audiomunity has inspired me to take Prof. Mowshowitz’s immunology course here at Columbia, so I look forward to hearing Prof. Racaniello’s guest lecture on vaccines later this month!

Thank you for all the work you put into this podcast.

Sam Matthews

J.D. Candidate 2019

Columbia Law School

Jim writes:

Catching up on the Immune podcast and got through number 7 today. Loved this explanation of complement and it relationship to Alzheimer’s

A little surprised at the pessimism about aging, forgetting words, falling apart physically, having the body wear out at young age, decreased libido. Don’t think the decreased libido got mentioned. Alzheimer’s seemed inevitable???

Would like to offer a pick of the week about this stuff.

The link is to a YouTube video by Joel Furhman MD Called Eat to Live. It may offer some hope for improving the chance of living in pretty good health with a well functioning memory, libido. It has worked pretty well for us in the last two years. Improvement is gradual and there are set backs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXMzWkzqkao&t=47s

Ken writes:

Greetings all,

Episode 9 included a discussion of introductory books about immunology. I recently read The Immune System: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Klenerman (Oxford University Press). Since immunology is far from my field (computers and education) I like these short introductions because they don’t take a long time to read. I also enjoyed Viruses: A Very Short Introduction by Dorothy H. Crawford for the same reason. I haven’t read the microbiology one and it seems there isn’t one on parasites.