In March 2020, before the state of alarm came into effect, Dr. Ricardo Cubedo He sent a WhatsApp to his daughter, who was in the Netherlands worried about the situation, explaining everything that was known about that new coronavirus at the time.
Hoaxes and misinformation were already beginning to spread, so the doctor wanted to summarize the certainties that were held at that time, with clarity and data. That 20-minute audio was just the first in a series of messages on key issues around the virus, vaccines, or the immune system.
The initiative by Cubedo, a medical oncologist and researcher at the Puerta de Hierro University Hospital and the MD Anderson Center, later became a podcast. And it is completed now with a book, ‘The transparent organ’ (Larousse)with which the doctor wants to address “the intelligence of our immune system, one of the most fascinating and unexplored systems of our body” from a close language.
Most of us know very little “that complex and hidden system that we call ‘the defenses'”, raises Cubedo. It seems invisible and works “so perfectly” that we often don’t notice its existence. But we are heavily dependent on him. And not only to protect us from external threats. It is also key for the repair of the organism, for learning or for our interaction with the environment, among other tasks.
“We tend to always think of immunity in terms of battle, of attack. But for example, there is a fundamental part of immunity that is what we could call diplomacy and that has to do with tolerance. There is a critical period in childhood, between birth and three years, which in our body are created as two lists. A black list and a guest list. It is the immune system that assigns substances to one list and another. And it seems that it is essential that for these two lists to be drawn up correctly, it is necessary for the child to be exposed to what surrounds him.”