I’m looking for a very basic text that explains basic concepts of immunology. I have found that the “required texts” are too detailed. I’m not looking for a review book that just summarizes…
Suggestions?
Thanks,
Lauren
is this for a college course or medical school?
I used Kuby in my ugrad immuno course and found it very readable - but it was definitely a text and not a review.
Believe it or not, Pitt Med now assigns “Basic Immunology” by Abbas. It was like “Immunology for Dummies,” one of my older classmates said. It made for an easy class.
Kuby’s the best of the immuno texts, I think.
Of the small abbreviated ones, the Abbas isn’t bad.
Few manage to give an overall theme to the immune system because the field is in rapid and exciting transition but the philosophy of the field is still being contested. (That is, the overall “story” we tell about the immune system. I’m a partisan of one of these stories, the Danger Model of Polly Matzinger; there are others, and there are those who believe there is no overall story and the system is really a hodge-podge of separate defense mechanisms patched together by other systems of integration, with no single way of describing the whole system.)
I can’t emphasize strongly enough the importance of going to talk to professors and/or more veteran students to try to look for connecting themes in order to make sense of the receptors, cytokines, etc. In my opinion, few of the current texts do this well. It is in having some “story” of the immune system that the details will begin to fall into place.
I particularly recommend approaching immunity from the point of view of starting in each case with what initiates the response–even if this is unknown by science, as in many cases of autoimmunity–and then what follows next, and next, and next.
joe
We used the Abbas text and I really liked it. I thought the diagrams did a good job of explaining the complicated pathways.
I second what Joe said about how to learn immunology. You need to know to keep all the players and their roles straight from the start.
Tara