The Atlantic

Listen: How Immunity Works

Zombies, villagers, and Navy SEALs. An immunologist explains the immune system.
Source: Brendan McDermid / Reuters / The Atlantic

On this episode of the podcast Social Distance, Katherine Wells gets the results of her coronavirus and antibody tests. She has questions about what they mean, so an expert joins to explain the immune system (with help from James Hamblin’s metaphors).

Lisa Butterfield is a tumor immunologist who works in cancer immunotherapy. She’s the vice president of research and development at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and an adjunct professor at UC San Francisco.

Listen to their conversation here:

Subscribe to Social Distance on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they’re published.


What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.

Katherine Wells: Are you the type of scientist who always figured a pandemic was around the corner, or are you the type that really never thought it could get to this level?

I’m not surprised, given the signals we’ve seen from around the globe where

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