LAUSR

In the course Functional Anatomy, a bachelor course which I teach at University College Roosevelt, I have tried to introduce each organ system with an appropriate fragment of a Bob Dylan song. In preparation of the class on the immune system, two relevant fragments were found on the album “The other side of Bob Dylan”, released more than 50 years ago, on August 8, 1964 by Columbia Records. Over the years, the lyrics of Dylan have been studied by scholars from various disciplines such as historical, political, theological [1–4] but never before from an immunological point of view. A detailed analysis of the lyrics of this album (http://bobdylan.com/) shows that in fact ‘’The other side of Bob Dylan’’ is an immune concept album, which will be argued below. The final song of this immune concept album (It ain’t me babe (track 11)) has the most direct link to the immune system: ‘’To protect an’ defend you’’ (Figure 1). Obviously, the function of the immune system is to protect and defend you against infectious diseases, as well as to prevent transformed cells to grow out and become a tumor. The two major characteristics of the immune system, specificity and memory, each are dealt with separate songs.