Every time you get sick, your body keeps a record of it.
It does so through your immune system, a vast army of cells that mobilizes to fight off diseases. And after the infection is over — if it’s ever over — some of those cells still float through you, a record of what you’ve been through, prepared for the next time you encounter that disease.
We have lots of tools to diagnose diseases, but what bothered Maxim Zaslavsky, a genetics and computer science postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, is that those tools don’t make much use of the immune system’s built-in records of disease exposures: B and T cells.
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