Immunologists use psychological and cognitive terms to describe and explain the behavior of our immune system. Do they use them metaphorically or literally? In this paper I show that on the grounds of some psychophysical assumptions, the uniqueness of each person as an individual organism necessarily corresponds to the singularity of each person as a psychological subject. On the basis of these assumptions, immunologists, irrespective of their various conceptual frames, are entitled to ascribe psychological and cognitive traits to our immune (...) system and its behavior. Immunologists are allowed to do so because each immune system of any higher, unique individual organism corresponds to psychological traits, which are ascribable only to persons, each of whom is a singular being. This correspondence is necessarily compatible with the psychophysical unity or inseparability. Furthermore, the psychological or cognitive traits pertain to the immune system require no consciousness. In the case of artificial immune systems, in contrast, the application of psychological or cognitive terms is only metaphorical, for each such system is not unique but it is duplicable or replicable. Only the immune system of unique individual organisms that as psychological subjects are singular beings—i.e. persons—can be subject, literally or non-metaphorically, to psychological and cognitive terms. (shrink)

The historiography of immunology since 1999 is reviewed, in part as a response to claims by historians such as Thomas Söderqvist the field was still immature at the time. First addressed are the difficulties, past and present, surrounding the disciplinary definition of immunology, which is followed by a commentary on the recent scholarship devoted to the concept of the immune self. The new literature on broad immunological topics is examined and assessed, and specific charges leveled against the paucity of certain (...) types of histories, e.g. biographical and institutional histories, are evaluated. In conclusion, there are compelling indications that the history of immunology has moved past the initial tentative stages identified in the earlier reviews to become a bustling, pluripotent discipline, much like the subject of its scrutiny, and that it continues to develop in many new and exciting directions. (shrink)

Given immunity’s general role in the organism’s economy—both in terms of its internal environment as well as mediating its external relations—immune theory has expanded its traditional formulation of preserving individual autonomy to one that includes accounting for nutritional processes and symbiotic relationships that require immune tolerance. When such a full ecological alignment is adopted, the immune system becomes the mediator of both defensive and assimilative environmental intercourse, where a balance of immune rejection and tolerance governs the complex interactions of the (...) organism’s ecological relationships. Accordingly, immunology, which historically had affiliated with the biology of individuals, now becomes a science concerned with the biology of communities. With this translocation, the ontological basis of the organism is undergoing a profound change. Indeed, the recent recognition of the ubiquity of symbiosis has challenged the traditional notions of biological individuality and requires a shift in the metaphysics undergirding biology, in which a philosophy of the organism must be characterized by ecological dialectics “all-the-way-down.”. (shrink)

Holobionts are multicellular eukaryotes with multiple species of persistent symbionts. They are not individuals in the genetic sense— composed of and regulated by the same genome—but they are anatomical, physiological, developmental, immunological, and evolutionary units, evolved from a shared relationship between different species. We argue that many of the interactions between human and microbiota symbionts and the reproductive process of a new holobiont are best understood as instances of reciprocal scaffolding of developmental processes and mutual construction of developmental, ecological, and (...) evolutionary niches. Our examples show that mother, fetus, and different symbiotic microbial communities induce or constitute conditions for the development and reproduction of one another. These include the direct induction of maternal or fetus physiological changes, the restructuring of ecological relations between communities, and evolutionary selection against undesirable competitors. The mutual scaffolding and niche constructing processes start early—prior to amniotic rupture. We are evolutionarily, physiologically, and developmentally integrated holobiont systems, strung together through mutual reliance and mutual construction. Bringing the processes of niche construction and developmental scaffolding together to interpret holobiont birth conceptually scaffolds two new directions for research: in niche construction, identifying the evolutionary implications of organisms actively constructing multiple overlapping niches and scaffolds, and in Evolutionary Developmental Biology, characterizing evolutionary and ecological processes as developmental causes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT During the past thirty years, immunological metaphors, motifs, and models have come to shape much social theory and philosophy. Immunology, so it seems, often has served to naturalize claims about self, identity, and sovereignty—perhaps most prominently in Jacques Derrida's later studies. Yet the immunological science that functions as “nature” in these social and philosophical arguments is derived from interwar and Cold War social theory and philosophy. Theoretical immunologists and social theorists knowingly participated in a common culture. Thus the “naturalistic (...) fallacy” in this case might be reframed as an error of categorization: its conditions of possibility would require ceaseless effort to purify and separate out the categories of nature and culture. The problem—inasmuch as there is a problem—therefore is not so much the making of an appeal to nature as assuming privileged access to an independent, sovereign category called “nature.”. (shrink)

An allergy is commonly understood to be an overreaction of the immune system to harmless substances that are misrecognised as foreign. This concept of allergy as an abnormal, misdirected immune response—a biological fault—stems from the idea that the immune system is an inherently defensive operation designed to protect the individual through an innate capacity to discriminate between the benign and toxic, or self and nonself. However, this definition of allergy represents a radical departure from its original formulation. Literally meaning ‘altered (...) reactivity’, the term was coined in 1906 by Austrian paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet, to describe the fundamentally mutable nature of the immune response.This paper argues that the conventional interpretation of allergy-as-pathology derives from specific concepts of ‘organism’, ‘response’, and ‘normal’ immune function that have—for over a century—governed the perception and study of immune phenomena within immunology. Through an examination of Louis Pasteur’s conceptualisation of the host body/microorganism relationship, I argue that immunology is founded on a view of the organism as a discrete, autonomous entity, and on a concomitant notion of the immune response as essentially reactive. Revisiting the concept of ‘altered reactivity’, this paper points to the fact that allergy was initially posited as a general theory of immune responsiveness and, importantly, one that poses a significant challenge to orthodox notions of immunopathology. It suggests that Pirquet’s unique view of immune responsiveness presents an account of organismic or biological identity that encapsulates, rather than reduces, its ecological complexity. (shrink)

It has long been taken for granted that the immune system’s capacity to protect an individual from infection and disease depends on the power of the system to distinguish between self and nonself. However, accumulating data have undermined this fundamental concept. Evidence against the self/nonself discrimination model left researchers in need of a new overarching framework able to capture the immune system’s reactivity. Here, I highlight that along with the self/nonself model, another powerful representation of the immune system’s reactivity has (...) been developed in the twentieth century immunology. According to this alternative view, the immune system is not a killer of nonself strangers but a peace-maker helping to establish harmony with the environment. The balance view of the system has never become part of the dominant paradigm. However, it is gaining more and more currency as new research develops. Advances in mucosal immunology confirm that instead of distinguishing between self and foreign the immune system reacts to microbial, chemical and self-induced alterations to produce responses that counterbalance effects of these changes. (shrink)

An autobiographical account is offered of how the medical study of self (immunology) became a chapter in the philosophical study of human agency (from Nietzsche and Thoreau to Freud by way of Wittgenstein). Whether viewed scientifically or philosophically, several themes converge on the intractable instability of any notion of selfhood—epistemological or moral. How this problematic motivated an extended analysis of selfhood refracts the psychology of the author and his pursuit of philosophy as self‐knowledge.

[Przekład] W artykule dokonano przeglądu historiografii immunologii od 1999 roku, co w pewnym stopniu jest odpowiedzią na stanowisko takich historyków jak Thomas Söderqvist, którzy twierdzili, że to pole badawcze nie było wówczas dość rozwinięte (Söderqvist i Stillwell). Najpierw wskazano przeszłe i teraźniejsze problemy, które historiografia ma ze zdefiniowaniem immunologii, a następnie skomentowano ostatnie studia nad pojęciem immunologicznego „ja”. W dalszym toku przeglądu przeanalizowano i oceniono nowe publikacje poświęcone zróżnicowanym zagadnieniom immunologii oraz niektóre charakterystyczne oskarżenia formułowane wobec niedostatku pewnych dziedzin historii, (...) na przykład historii biograficznych i historii instytucji. W podsumowaniu przedstawiono konkurujące ze sobą kierunki, w których rozwinęła się historia immunologii, wychodząc poza wstępne, tymczasowe stadia uchwycone w poprzednim przeglądzie, i stając się wielogłosową, pluripotencjalną dyscypliną, podobną do przedmiotu jej badań. Pokazano też, że historia immunologii nadal rozwija się na wiele nowych i ekscytujących sposobów. (shrink)