Immune System, The (6/8)
This is also part of this series: Don't Die Young (8)
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| Subjects: Anatomy, Health Issues, Human Body, Medicine, Nutrition, Science | ||||
She also puts her body on the front line by taking part in a stunt guaranteed to scare her, so that the scientific effects on her immune system can be observed. With her hands tied and screaming all the way, a terrified Dr Alice is dropped 23 metres from the ceiling of the Birmingham Symphony Hall in a free-fall abseil. Immunologist Josh Bosch from Birmingham University compares blood samples taken before and after Alice was purposefully terrorised. They show that Alice’s infection-fighting white blood cells were raised fivefold as a consequence. “This is a large stress response. Think about it in terms of predator and prey – a lion and a gazelle, for example. Not only does the gazelle need to escape, so its heart rate goes up to do all that physical action, it also needs to prepare its immune system for possible injury,” Dr Josh explains. Dr Alice is also joined in her exploration of the immune system by a group of young female university students from Nottingham. Ally, Karin, Sarah and Chizzy are sharing a house for the first time, as well as each other’s colds. They want to discover why they are so often ill. Could their party lifestyle and laid-back approach to housework be a factor? In Dr Alice’s laboratory, they are confronted with the horrifying results of the swabs taken from around their scruffy student house by a microbiologist. Using all the means at her disposal (dissections, drawings, paintball guns and even cakes), Dr Alice explains the fantastic complexity of our immune system. |
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