The Beautiful Cure: Harnessing Your Body's Natural Defences

Product Description

The immune system holds the key to human health. In The Beautiful Cure, leading immunologist Daniel Davis describes the scientific quest to understand how it works - and how it is affected by stress, sleep, age and our state of mind - and explains how this knowledge is now unlocking a revolutionary new approach to medicine and well-being.

The body's ability to fight disease and heal itself is one of the great mysteries and marvels of nature, but within the last few years painstaking research has resulted in major advances in our understanding of the immune system, revealing an inner world of breathtaking sophistication, complexity and beauty. Far more powerful than any medicine ever invented, it also plays a crucial role in our daily lives. Already we have found ways to harness these natural defences to create breakthrough drugs and therapies that help us fight cancer, diabetes, arthritis and many age-related diseases, and we are starting to understand whether or not activities such as mindfulness might play a role in enhancing our physical resilience.

Written by an expert at the forefront of this adventure, The Beautiful Cure tells a dramatic story of detective work and discovery, of puzzles solved and of the mysteries that remain, of lives sacrificed and saved, introducing the reader to this revelatory new understanding of the human body and what it takes to be healthy.The immune system holds the key to human health. In The Beautiful Cure, leading immunologist Daniel Davis describes the scientific quest to understand how it works - and how it is affected by stress, sleep, age and our state of mind - and explains how this knowledge is now unlocking a revolutionary new approach to medicine and well-being.

The body's ability to fight disease and heal itself is one of the great mysteries and marvels of nature, but within the last few years painstaking research has resulted in major advances in our understanding of the immune system, revealing an inner world of breathtaking sophistication, complexity and beauty. Far more powerful than any medicine ever invented, it also plays a crucial role in our daily lives. Already we have found ways to harness these natural defences to create breakthrough drugs and therapies that help us fight cancer, diabetes, arthritis and many age-related diseases, and we are starting to understand whether or not activities such as mindfulness might play a role in enhancing our physical resilience.

Written by an expert at the forefront of this adventure, The Beautiful Cure tells a dramatic story of detective work and discovery, of puzzles solved and of the mysteries that remain, of lives sacrificed and saved, introducing the reader to this revelatory new understanding of the human body and what it takes to be healthy.
Daniel M. Davis is Professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester. His research, using super-resolution microscopy to study immune cell biology, was listed in Discover magazine as one of the top 100 breakthroughs of the year. His previous book, The Compatibility Gene, was longlisted for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Science Book Prize, shortlisted for the Society of Biology Book Prize and described by Bill Bryson in the Guardian's Books of the Year as 'elegantly written and unexpectedly gripping'. He is also the author of over 120 academic papers, collectively cited over 10,000 times, including articles in Nature and Science and Scientific American.