ABSTRACT
My philosophical interests steered me away from the major experimental concerns preoccupying the immunology community during the 1980s and 1990s. These included the ground-breaking studies of novel genetic mechanics governing the immune response, new models of immune tolerance and autoimmunity, definition of the various mediators of the immune reaction and its regulation, and the isolation of the key molecular components of immune activation. Each of these areas deserved scrutiny, but I fastened on the identity question and saw it as the best target of philosophical study, although other candidates beckoned (e.g., information theory, model theory, and biological causation). However, one topic caught my interest as particularly important: the elucidation of the genetic mechanisms of antibody generation. 1 Scott Podolsky, a brilliant Harvard medical student, and I wrote Generation of Diversity, the definitive account of that crucial chapter of immunology’s history (Podolsky and Tauber, 1997). The book fit into my general ambition to write a history of immunology’s development, and this text contributed to that goal by describing the key triumph of twentieth century immunology. And it also highlighted my larger theme. While Scott put the experimental story together (affronting the key players and a threatened legal suit to stop publication by two of them!), I argued that the molecular solution offered no insight into a larger problem—the organization and regulation of the immune system. To address that domain of questions would require analysis of the system as a whole and a loosening the bounds imposed by reductionist science. In short, with the antibody story solved, I argued that deeper problems awaited. Those were articulated a decade later, when I turned from the self-centered, defensive thought style of the insular immune self to an expansive ecological revision of immune theory. That required revamping immunology’s central tenets.
