ABSTRACT
Instead of attempts to historically reconstitute a field of knowledge around practice rather than theory, our conference participants presented us with a series of investigations, each of which showed the way the parameters of immunity had been determined differently in specific contexts. Indeed, in the instances with which our volume begins, it is difficult to identify anything like immunology, properly speaking, even though theories of immunity and their attendant experimental systems did precipitate out of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century debates over the risks of smallpox vaccination. More recent instantiations of the question of immunity appear no less practical. Identifying and defining AIDS at the National Institutes of Health, for example, seemed to be more a matter of clinical and institutional orientation than
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theoretical predisposition, while radioimmunoassays appear to have initially emerged and proliferated less for their theoretical value than for the perceived need to find novel and practical applications of radioisotopes.
