From leading immunologist and social media star Dr. Melanie Matheu, a new framework for bringing a vast, invisible biological system into cultural focus and fundamentally changing how readers understand their own bodies. For fans of The Emperor of All Maladies and I Contain Multitudes but for the immune system.
ONE (IMMUNE) SYSTEM TO RULE THE WORLD
by Melanie Matheu
Viking, Spring 2028
(via Park, Fine & Brower)
ONE (IMMUNE) SYSTEM TO RULE THE WORLD introduces readers to the most powerful, hyperintelligent system in your own body: the immune system. Rather than an an academic introduction or an attempt to compress decades of research and millions of peer reviewed articles, this book provides frameworks of thinking about the immune system: how the it functions inside of us and what happens when it goes wrong. In these pages you will find historical missteps, accidental discoveries, and the sheer tour-de-force of scientists, to provide both context and color for how the understanding of this ancient system has developed and where it’s going from here.
Dr. Matheu will cover:
• How seemingly unrelated diseases are linked, like how Graves’ Disease, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, and Rheumatoid Arthritis are connected both to each other.
• The discovery of the immune system and how our understanding has developed from ancient China and Greece to the HIV/AIDS crisis and COVID-19.
• How the immune system and the brain operate similarly and differently, and how when they ‘talk’ to each other it can change our health.
• How viral infection can lead to cancer and how future immune system hacking might be done to preempt cancer.
Dr. Melanie Matheu is a PhD immunologist whose expertise is on the dynamic behavior of immune cells and the translation of human immunobiology into biotechnology platforms. She holds a PhD in Immunology from the University of California, Irvine, where she was one of the first pioneers using live cell high-resolution, laser-based imaging of a variety of immune cells in living tissues to elucidate how the immune system self-organizes and makes decisions as cells respond to inflammatory disease, cancer, and viral infection. She reaches over 765K followers across Substack, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.