Benefit

(To those students who were urgently called to attend the tutorial by our honorary professor.)

Dear all,

I must say I was absolutely disappointed when I realized there were only three students (from a group of 30?) attending the tutorial.

Yes, I appreciate from your perspective the session may not be informative or beneficial or examination oriented or even comprehensible. I’ve said more than once to my colleagues it is easier to give a tutorial by myself than to orchestrate the nitty-gritty.

Nonetheless, teaching session of this kind is essential and beneficial in the long run – and not only by training you all to endure all those endless meetings in the public hospital system.

The actual reason is somewhat convoluted for explanation. Well, to put it simply, medical schools do not survive on their own, and they don’t even survive by government subsidy alone. There are councils, academy, colleges, donors, and a whole lot of other important people. I suppose delinquent behaviour of yours would not make a friendly lymphocyte produce autoantibodies, but may merely damp down the activity of an important regulatory T cell – and that’s sufficient to trigger damage later.

It is, of course, difficult to understand immunology – and political immunology is the most difficult subject of all. As a result, I integrate the information for you, and put down in the notice “all students must attend”. I mean what I say.

Sincerely,

Your malicious nephrologist
(with some immunology background)