In last Tuesday’s New York Times, Natalie Angier reported on some recent medical discoveries regarding the spleen:
"Scientists have discovered that the spleen, long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs and known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body’s defense system than anyone suspected.
Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis. …
That researchers are only now discovering a major feature of a rather large organ they have been studying for at least 2,000 years demonstrates yet again that there is nothing so foreign as the place we call home.
‘Often, if you come across something in the body that seems like a big deal, you think, "Why didn’t anybody check this before?"’ Dr. Nahrendorf said. ‘But the more you learn, the more you realize that we’re just scratching on the surface of life. We don’t know the whole story about anything.’"
This is yet another example of how little we know – in spite of how much more we know today than we knew just a few years ago.
I would suggest that we should remember stories like this one when some group of experts tells us that the answer to a question is settled without a doubt or some group of politicians claims that they, and nobody else, know the only solution for some crisis.
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