What I Learned: Autoimmunity, Greek, and Blood Types

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This week I didn’t learn anything earth shattering, although I am reading a book on autoimmune disease that will play into a series I do in the future. But right now I’m just doing research for a immunology paper. It’s a very good book called The Autoimmune Epidemic. It is extremely accessible to non-scientists, to the point that it actually gets a little annoying for me. No matter what level of knowledge you come into that book with, it really makes you think.

As I said, I’ll talk more about this in the future, but let’s just say: autoimmune diseases are scary stuff. So is the quantity of chemicals found in our bodies.

On a completely unrelated note, one thing I learned this week is that the term “Eureka!” comes from the Ancient Greek word for “find” or “discover”: ευρισκω. Transliterated, this word is “eurisko” (eur-is-ko). The funny thing is that when I was trying to learn this vocab word, I said to myself, “It kinda sounds like ‘eureka’ if you think about it, and that’s like ‘discover.'” Then the next day, my professor told us that Archimedes actually did say “Eureka!” and that it is a perfect form of the verb that means something like, “I just discovered this thing and I’m still feeling awesome because of it!”

Except dead languages are ridiculously concise (and awesome), so they can say all that in one word and get stories told about it thousands of years later in physics class.

I also learned that the word “doula” comes from the Greek word for “female slave.” Interesting, no?

On Tuesday I learned all about ABO (blood type) antigens and antibodies. Can you believe that, at the age of 22, I still don’t know my blood type? I could ask my parents’ theirs, and I know how to use Mendelian genetics to determine what my blood type may be, but I don’t know what it actually is. Apparently this is because schools and governments have decided there is too much liability to do blood typing as part of a science lab anymore.

Like I said, nothing huge like the past two weeks. Just little things that make me smile.

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