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Pre-order on Amazon! release date 1/Feb/2021
8 November 2020
The Gastro-archeologist: revealing the mysteries of the intestine and its diseases by J Woodward, illustrated by C Manning
The story of the gut and how it has played a central role in the evolution of life and immunity, providing a perspective that helps us to understand how the immune system of the gut leads to disease such as food allergy, coeliac disease and inflammatory bowel diseases.
The Gastro-archeologist
The immune system of the gut and its diseases such as coeliac disease and Crohn's disease seems incredibly complex. In this book I explore why: in the first part I explore the antiquity of the gut and its origins and how the evolution of animals depended on the gut and forms of ingestion ('eating') from single-celled to multicellular organisms. The second part demonstrates that the immune system evolved as a necessary 'rule-book' between cells to prevent them from cheating from within and without the organism, and co-evolved with the gut for the development of multi-cellularity; how the evolution of the immune system in the gut has taken place over aeons, and has has done so in a way that duplicates and refines rather than reinvents. The third part of my book applies these principles to enable an understanding of the diseases of the gut by demonstrating that the complexity of the gut immune system can be visualised more easily by separating out the layers over time - just like an archeologist who digs a 'trench' that separates out the artefacts from different periods to see their relationship.