Nautilus

Teaching Your Body to Fight the Enemy Within

Some cancer therapies focus the attention of the immune system like a spotlight over Hollywood.Everett Collection / Shutterstock

n early May, 1891, William Coley, a New York surgeon, had before him an interesting case. The patient, a 35-year-old Italian man, had sarcoma tumors in his neck and tonsils, and was slowly starving to death as a result of the chicken-egg-sized mass protruding from his right tonsil into his throat. He could not eat solid food; liquids were not a safe bet either, as he sometimes aspirated them up his nose. A surgeon in Rome had operated

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus7 min read
A Radical Rescue for Caribbean Reefs
It’s an all-too-familiar headline: Coral reefs are in crisis. Indeed, in the past 50 years, roughly half of Earth’s coral reefs have died. Coral ecosystems are among the most biodiverse and valuable places on Earth, supporting upward of 860,000 speci
Nautilus8 min read
10 Brilliant Insights from Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the product of evolution. He believed that we are, in a sense, machi
Nautilus8 min read
What Counts as Consciousness
Some years ago, when he was still living in southern California, neuroscientist Christof Koch drank a bottle of Barolo wine while watching The Highlander, and then, at midnight, ran up to the summit of Mount Wilson, the 5,710-foot peak that looms ove

Related Books & Audiobooks