Understanding immunity: an alternative framework beyond defense and strength

Abstract

In this paper we address the issue of how to think about immunity. Many immunological writings suggest a straightforward option: the view that the immune system is primarily a system of defense, which naturally invites the talk of strong immunity and strong immune response. Despite their undisputable positive role in immunology, such metaphors can also pose a risk of establishing a narrow perspective, omitting from consideration phenomena that do not neatly fit those powerful metaphors. Building on this analysis, we argue two things. First, we argue that the immune system is involved not only in defense. Second, by disentangling various possible meanings of ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ in immunology, we also argue that such a construal of immunity generally contributes to the distortion of the overall picture of what the immune system is, what it does, and why it sometimes fails. Instead, we propose to understand the nature of the immune system in terms of contextuality, regulation, and trade-offs. We suggest that our approach provides lessons for a general understanding of the organizing principles of the immune system in health and disease. For all this to work, we discuss a wide range of immunological phenomena.

Pandemic Life-lines: A Multimodal Autoethnography of COVID-19 Illness, Isolation, and Shared Immunities

“…To put it simply, immunity, or immunities, if we pluralise the term, vary in scale and scope. The appropriateness and effectiveness of immune responses to infectious disease is not fixed: these are contextual and temporally sensitive, since immunity depends on the coordination of different biological and biosocial elements, as well as of 'outer' and 'inner' environments such as the microbiome (see Zach and Greslehner 2023). It follows from these arguments that the meaning of immunity may be poorly construed as a synonym of 'invulnerability' and antonym of 'community', or through the biopolitical vocabularies of bodies, borders, and battlefields.…”

“…Efforts to achieve 'group-level protection' and 'population immunity' through rapid vaccination roll-out, as the taskforce lead put it, were starting to curb disease incidence, thereby helping people to 'regain their lives' (DN 2021). These ideas, paired with notions of 'strong' immune protection (Zach and Greslehner 2023), visualisations of growing vaccination rates, and the alleviation of public health measures, conveyed a sense of hope for a quick return to 'normal' social life.…”

“…I argue that these shared immunities intersect and complement other lines of immunity, such as those acquired through vaccination, in ways that are sometimes choreographed and intentionally coordinated and, other times, unanticipated. It follows from these arguments that, in the context of COVID-19, we may reimagine the social ecology of immunity as a meshwork that relies on individual and physiological specificities, environmental contingencies, and on multiscalar, non-local relations between them, as emphasised by social and life scientists alike (see e.g., Martin 1990;Haraway 1991;Cohen 2009;Rieckmann et al 2017;Zach and Greslehner 2023). The conceptual point made here should not diminish, in any way, the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to date; quite the contrary.…”

“…Whether curvy or flat, digital or physical, social or infrastructural, these everyday life-lines and relations evoke what scholars, across feminist science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, sociology, and philosophy, have characterised as the paradigm or logic of immunity. The logic of immunity is that which seeks to defend an organism from invasion or danger by demarcating the boundaries of body/self against non-self/other bodies (Martin 1990;Haraway 1991;Cohen 2009;Esposito 2011;Zach and Greslehner 2023). This immunological discourse conflates biological and political discourses about the body and its borders (i.e., both the organismic body and the body politic), through metaphors of aggression/response that seem to imply the protection-and conversely also the negation-of life (Cohen 2009;Filipe , 2014a.…”

Reuniting philosophy and science to advance cancer research

“…As examined by philosophers (Pradeu, 2019; Zach & Greslehner, 2023), the role of the immune system in cancer progression is at odds with most traditional views in immunology, especially those based on self–non‐self and defence (Pardoll, 2003). Most tumours originate from the self, and yet are detectable by the immune system.…”