Introduction: Immunology as a historical object

Journal of the History of Biology, 1994

Handbook of the Historiography of Biology, 2019

In this chapter, we provide an overview of attempts from different disciplines to treat immunology and immunity as objects in the history of science. Despite the science’s immense potential, there is a paucity of broad, synthetic historical scholarship, compared to writings about the philosophy and, indeed, historiography of immunology. Following a reprise of the origins of immunology as a field of investigation, we trace the pathways through which histories of immunology, and their entwined philosophies, have developed and matured over the past century. The recent output of expansive “denaturalized” histories, which has given rise to a variegated and relatively autonomous historical landscape, is surveyed. The chapter concludes with a call for fuller realization of histories of immunology and immunity, with scholarship that is more comparative, connected, and transnational, rather than internally focused on biography, institutional development, and the succession of ideas and techniques.

Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2014

Stranded between medicine and experimental biology, immunology is buried in its own problems and remains distant from important areas of current biology, such as evolutionary theory, developmental biology and cognitive sciences. Immunology has treated the living system merely as the place or dimension in which immune activity takes place, inserted on a misleading axis (progressive responsiveness versus no response; memory versus tolerance) which neglects the analysis of a robustly stable dynamics which is always present and is neither tolerance nor immunity-a problem currently approached as one of "regulatory" activity. However, a regulatory response also demands regulation, leading to an endless recursion and the adoption of a stimulus-response framework inevitably drives us away from the physiological processes in which lymphocytes are involved. Herein, we propose that immunological physiology, like everything else in the body is dynamic and conservative. Immunopathology, including inherited immunodeficiencies, severe forms of infectious diseases, allergy and autoimmune diseases, are interferences with this stability which frequently include oligoclonal expansions of T lymphocytes. We suggest that this decrease in clonal diversity results from a loss of the stabilizing connectivity among lymphocytes and are not simply markers of immunopathology, but are rather expressions of basic pathogenic mechanisms. The so-called autoimmune diseases are examples of this disequilibrium. In the last decade the characterization of an enormous and diversified commensal microbiota has posed a new and pressing problem: how to explain the harmonic conviviality with trillions of foreign macromolecules. In addition, robustly stable relations towards macromolecular diet can be established by simple ingestion, a state presently labeled as "oral tolerance", a problem that has been buffered for decades as anti-inflammatory protection of the gut. A major change in terminology is necessary to describe this new panorama. We focus on two important gaps in immunological discussions: (a) the organism, seen simultaneously as the medium with which the immune system is constantly in touch and as the entity that mediates the contact with external materials; and (b) the observer, the immunologist, who operates as a human being in human languaging with other human beings, and characterizes immunological specificity. We acknowledge that we are proposing radical departures from current dogma and that we should justify them. Most of what we propose stem form a way of seeing called Biology of Cognition and Language, that derives from ideas of the neurobiologist/ philosopher Humberto Maturana, also known as "autopoiesis theory".

Cellular Immunology, 1989

The presentation of the phagocytic theory of immunity, proposed by Metchnikoff in 1883, was immediately attacked by German pathologists and microbiologists. Led by Baumgarten and Ziegler, criticism was levied against the hypothesis in three general respects: 1) Can an analogy truly be established between leukocyte phagocytosis and feeding of monocellular organisms? 2) What is compelling about the phagocytic process as a universal defensive activity? 3) General philosophic objections were raised, centered upon the accusation of a teleologic formulation. Underlying the argument was the rejection of the notion that the response of phagocytic leukocytes was truly causal in the successful response to infection. We note that the humoral school of immunity was not established until 1888-1890, and the early debate between Metchnikoff and his detractors was not over an alternative theory of an active immune response. There was none. With the development of the humoralist position, in direct response to Metchnikotf's formulation, a true dialogue about immunity, in the modern context of active host response, was initiated. The debate at this point changed to issues of mechanism (cellular versus humoral effecters), and the relative importance of defining innate versus acquired immune processes. Our study traces the scientific and logical basis ofthe initial rejection ofthe phagocytosis theory. More broadly, the analysis of this debate elucidates the emergence of a new concept of immunity that rested upon the notion of an active host response. The humoralists erected their theory on Metchnikoff's original scaffold, and the ensuing debate of the nascent science relied on the successful establishment of his basic concept. With the studies of Bordet, Metchnikoff's protege, the essential resolution of the acrimonious debate was offered. Metchnikoff continued his research by attempting to apply the phagocytosis theory to mechanisms of senility, while immunology oriented itselftoward the biochemical definition ofimmune recognition. o 1989 Academic Press, Inc. I. THE SETTING Elie Metchnikoff s work must be woven within several threads of prevailing biological attitudes of the 1880s. The first is within the context of inflammation's role in disease and its basic operative mechanisms. As Metchnikoff acknowledged, an important impetus for his own work was Cohnheim's "Lectures on General Pathology," whose conclusions concerning the nature of inflammation were based on experiments performed in the late 1860s and early 1870s (l-3); as opposed to Virchow,

Avant: the journal of the philosophical-interdisciplinary vanguard

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 (Söderqvist & Stillwell 1999). 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.