THE IMMUNE CODE AND BOUNDARY OF SELF

In a laboratory in Birmingham in the early 1950s, a mouse was wearing skin that belonged to a different strain of mouse, and was doing so with complete indifference. It should have destroyed the graft within a fortnight. It never destroyed it. The animal had been injected before birth with cells from the donor line, and that was enough: the foreign tissue had arrived early, and early was all that mattered. Peter Medawar, who ran that experiment with a doctoral student and a postdoctoral fellow and a great deal of nerve, received the Nobel Prize for it in 1960, and transplantation surgery became possible because of it. He is called the father of transplantation, which he would have found funny, since he was not a physician and never treated a patient in his life. This book argues that his experiment proved something larger than the prize was awarded for, and that the field has still not absorbed it. Immunology had christened itself the science of telling self from nonself. But a body that can be talked into adopting a stranger has no way of telling self from anything. It registers what was present when the accounting was done, and treats the rest as a problem. The two rules agree almost always. Medawar built the one arrangement in which they disagree - and the word survived anyway, and steered the clinic toward suppressing the immune system rather than renegotiating with it. Around that argument stands one of the most quotable lives in modern science. A Lebanese father selling British dentures to Brazilians. A school Medawar compared, in print, to a training academy for the SS. A doctorate he never bought because he needed the money for an appendix operation. A wartime glue for severed nerves, made from human blood. Six pages in 1961 that demolished the most fashionable book in Europe. An essay asking whether the scientific paper is a fraud, whose answer was yes. A theory of why we grow old that nobody quotes and everybody uses. And a stroke that struck him down mid-sentence in Exeter Cathedral at fifty-four, after which he wrote his best books with half a body. >Keywords: immunology; transplantation; immunological tolerance; Peter Medawar; self and nonself; history of science; philosophy of biology