Immunology has appropriated itself the task of defining the organismal self. This is not a typical definition of the discipline. The general view presents the science, since its birth, as committed to discerning those mechanisms by which the “self” discriminates host elements from the foreign: The latter are destroyed by immune cells and their products, whereas the normal constituents of the animal are ignored. In other words, the identity of the host organism is given or assumed. But such neat divisions or boundaries were adopted, or at best were drawn with a certainty that remained problematic. Aside from competing theoretical formulations, early discrepancies accompanied the full embrace of a self/nonself discriminatory mode to explain immune function. However, by the mid-twentieth century, a formal theory of self/nonself discrimination was articulated that would attempt to clearly demarcate the host organism from the foreign by an immune system that under normal conditions discerned the self and protected it.This basic formulation has served as the foundation of the contemporary science.   

To erect such an edifice is to explain the development of the field by assuming a major presupposition, namely that there is a definable self that might be defended. After all, are we not selves? I have contested that view at its foundations.  For me the history of immunology is precisely the very attempt to define such an entity.  And the reading I have offered contends that it is the problem of a “self” that has besieged the theoretical fortress immunology has attempted to erect. Briefly put, contemporary immunology is neatly divided between those who adopt a modernist notion of the self, namely that there indeed is a “self,” and those who regard the self as a metaphoric construction extrapolated from an anthropological formulation.  On this latter view, immunology cannot accept organismal identity as a given, but must pose the self as its core problematic. Review of the history of this controversy will be presented.