In 1994 I bought my copy of the first edition of Abul K Abbas et al.'s Cellular and Molecular Immunology, copyrighted three years earlier. This reference text had proved invaluable to me during my work in histocompatibility in support of tissue transplantation. But a great deal of advancement in cellular and molecular biology has happened since those earlier times. The major impetus for the enormous expansion of our knowledge was work on HIV, followed by the Human Genome Project and other associated omics studies, development of next generation sequencing, in our improved understanding of oncological processes, and in the still nascent field of epigenetics. My fond memories of the first edition therefore made me very eager to read the 10th edition of 2022 and to see how far we've come.
A common trope frequently repeated about the Human Genome Project is that while we finally found a parts list of how to make a human, it reveals next to nothing about how those pieces are assembled and work together in health and disease. I submit this problem is the Mount Everest confronting all biologists at this stage of the scientific endeavor. Most scientists, it seems to me, are very narrowly focused on their own intensely complex projects and scarcely have time to look up and see the harrowing bigger picture. This is not a bad thing: at this point in science very close scrutiny paid to all the moving parts is vital. But one consequence is that it becomes a serious challenge to discriminate between the near-trivial minutiae and more significant insights. We accordingly get fact-crammed books that are overloaded with both kinds of insights (doubtless more that's near-trivial, far less that's significantly insightful), and only with time will we be able to more fittingly winnow the wheat from the chaff. This is all probably an unavoidable outcome of the dispersive time in which we are living. It may be that artificial intelligence will be able to distill out myopic human biases and lead us out of this prevailing chaotic wilderness. For now though we must work with what we have.
Biologists are notoriously bad at coining useful terminology, having little or no sense of the importance of syntax or etymology. Whether consciously or no (and usually no), we rely on context all the time to infer meaning in conversation or in text, and the source of context is often related to either how the words are assembled in sequence (syntax) or in what other, more familiar words they remind us of (etymology). Biologists ignore such niceties and give important concepts sterile names like NF-κB, TLR, Th1, Th2, Th17, Tfh, CD16a (also known as FcγRIIIA), ADCC, CD247 (also known as TCR ζ chain), c-KIT ligand, TSLP, interferon-λs (also known as type III IFNs), and so on ad nauseam. This jargon is not, as is sometimes claimed, invented to conceal meaning from the layman, but has a more prosaic and all too human source: egotism. Names given by original sources tend to stick, even when the original assumed meaning of a name is later proved either wrong or a minor feature of a much broader physiological activity. That is to say, even if a covert etymology is present, it is often enough misleading. Toll was originally named for a gene involved in fruit fly development. Mammalian homologs to the Toll protein, which play a central and vital role in innate defense against viral invaders, thus became Toll-like receptors, or TLR, second in my list above: a role far more important than their relatively obscure original mention in fruit fly ontogeny. So it goes.
We can't blame Abbas et al. for the syntax- and etymology-free jargon with which the 10th edition is copiously littered, but this philological junkyard necessarily prejudices this book, and others like it, against comprehension by mere mortals. One simply cannot hold in one's mind all the diverse and unsystematic assemblages of molecular structures, molecular families, main cellular expression tissues or cells, and known or proposed functions of 369 or so cell markers distinguished only by the letters CD followed by a number, for example. The same kind of problem exists with interleukins, interferons, cytokines, etc. On the other hand, we can blame Abbas et al. for other shortcomings unique to this volume, which unnecessarily interfere with understanding. Unfortunately, the 10th edition is painfully, annoyingly, and irritatingly repetitive: in style, it is far from user-friendly. In the preface this repetition was presented as a feature, but don't be fooled: it's a bug. But even the repetition is nowhere near as annoying, irritating and positively infuriating as the recurrent tic of inserting a parenthetical "(described later)" on every second or third page of the text, particularly when what is to be "(described later)" crops up, more often than not, a few hundred pages further on, by which time you've encountered so many "(described laters)" that you've given up on trying to keep track of them all. This is sloppy writing in open rebellion against the usual goal of an author's attempt to communicate with his reader, who therefore only wants to fling the book against the far wall with every new iteration of "(described later)". This sin is so frequent in the text that if we take Abbas et al. literally, as we expect to do in nonfiction, then we cannot fully understand any of the book until we've read absolutely all of it and, presumably, have taken the relevance and meaning of all those infernal "(described laters)" onboard. Gah! Awful.
I come from a background in which I think immunology is about the coolest thing ever. A good immunology text ought to convey the majesty, almost the magical wonder, of the human immune system. Unfortunately, the 10th edition does the opposite of that. I read this book cover to cover and found it unbearably repetitive, with dull, tedious writing. The effect was often soporific. My guess is that after 10 editions of adding layer upon layer to the original skeleton, it's time to rethink the project in its entirety, scrap the old model and start from scratch. I'd also add that one of the things I loved about the 1st edition was the stylized line-drawing graphics: it was always easy to immediately recognize which cell types were involved in various intercellular interactions. The fancy, colored graphics now in use are far worse and are not immediately recognizable, again interfering with comprehension.
I really, really expected to like this book. I did not. This was a much more difficult slog than, say, was reading Finnegans Wake, where the etymology at least is always present, even if it takes a lifetime to dredge it forth. As I took some time here to point out, the complexity is not entirely the fault of the authors, but sadly for me, enough fault does lie at their doorstep to disallow a favorable review of the book.