Miriam Merad’s fascination with macrophages began when she looked into the lungs of a cancer patient she’d just lost during her residency. He developed a rare allergy to the chemotherapy, and died rapidly. The case still haunts her. “When you have a patient dying of a treatment that you gave, you never forget that,” she said. “It’s very present.”

The medical team figured the tumor plus the allergy led to his death. But Merad couldn’t shake how extreme the allergic reaction was and insisted on an autopsy. Within hours, she had lung tissue. “We did what we call a warm autopsy. I looked at it and, I mean, these lesions,” she recalled, holding her hands up. “The cancer was gone. There were no cancer cells, and it was full of macrophages.”

The sight stunned her. Macrophages, immune cells ofte

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