ABSTRACT
Several novel ideas emerged from my Metchnikoff studies. The first concerned the prevailing definition of the science: Immunology, according to textbooks, is the science of self/nonself discrimination. This shorthand definition refers to the basic clinical orientation of the discipline: the immune system discerns the “other” (whether foreign or degenerate host) and then destroys the pathogen or rectifies the pathology. This dichotomy depends on a putative construct of identity, the immune self, by which immunity is the function that recognizes and acts on a duality of self and foreign. But I argue that this conceptual architecture employs selfhood as a metaphor, because the immune self has no standing as an entity. Selfhood is a powerful idiom, but it cannot claim scientific status as an object, a “thing” with defined borders and characteristics. Simply, notwithstanding the pragmatic, heuristic utility of the selfhood idiom, the immune self lacks a satisfactory epistemological definition (Tauber 2000; 2004).
