On Immunity: An Inoculation

The concept of self is fundamental to the science of immunity, and the dominant thinking in immunology is that the immune system must discriminate between self and nonself, and then eliminate or contain the nonself within protective barriers.

our bodies may belong to us, but we ourselves belong to a greater body composed of many bodies. We are, bodily, both independent and dependent.

Some prefer to assume health as an identity. I am healthy, we tell each other, meaning that we eat certain foods and avoid others, that we exercise and do not smoke. Health, it is implied, is the reward for living the way we live, and lifestyle is its own variety of immunity.

What has been done to us seems to be, among other things, that we have been made fearful. What will we do with our fear? This strikes me as a central question of both citizenship and motherhood.

When health becomes an identity, sickness becomes not something that happens to you, but who you are.

I find the term nonself both perplexing and amusingly noncommittal. Just as undead seems to mean something between living and dead, nonself seems to mean something between self and other. Nonself, I suppose, is an apt description of the human condition. In terms of sheer numbers of cells, our bodies contain more other than self.

“Is the immune system at the heart of a new incarnation of social Darwinism that allows people of different ‘quality’ to be distinguished from each other?” asks the anthropologist Emily Martin.

“Morality can’t be fully private,” my sister tells me, “for many of the same reasons that a language can’t be fully private. You can’t be intelligible only to yourself. But thinking of the conscience as a private sense of right and wrong suggests that our collective understandings of justice can be insufficient. An individual might resist flaws in

“They aren’t blind,” my son says of moles, “they just can’t see.” The same could be said of humans.