## Metadata - Author: [[Rupa Marya]] - Full Title: Inflamed - Category: #books ## Highlights - Today, one of the enduring problems facing immunologists is that humans don’t come preloaded with immunity to everything. Even with phagocytes and the acquired immune system, the body doesn’t know how to attack every possible threat. Rather than stamping everything foreign as automatically bad, the immune system behaves more subtly, embracing a truth that many politicians don’t: most foreigners are friends, not foes. - Matzinger challenged the idea that the human body is as interested in “the self” as nineteenth-century liberalism was. It is a dynamic assembly of many different species, from our own cells to the millions of organisms who live on and inside us, whose presence is critical for development and health. The “self” of immunology is more porous and fluid than the one in liberal political science, able to be shaped by social, economic, and political injustices. Matzinger herself wrote, “The immune system does not care about self and non-self[;] its primary driving force is the need to detect and protect against danger.”107 In other words, it is “more concerned with damage than foreignness.” - The Danger Model also describes how a nonself entity, such as a virus, can become a beneficial agent of transformation for the self. Cells have developed mechanisms to resist viruses, but there are no living species without viruses. And viruses can bring about adaptive biological change. They are estimated to cause almost 30 percent of the adaptations in proteins that humans have in common with other mammals.113 Viruses that fly under the radar long enough to incorporate their genetic material into host cells can give rise to new phenotypes that may confer a survival advantage. Viral-derived genes are crucial to the evolutionary development of the human placenta. A viral gene encoded a protein that allowed the virus to fuse to host membrane cells, facilitating infection. When that viral genetic material got inserted and stabilized into the human genome, its function was repurposed. That same protein’s fusing capability now promotes a layer of cells that merge the placenta and the uterus. - The immune system is not just a war machine, as many still tend to think it is. Viruses can become us, a part of who we are. Humans are not little states with their own border patrol but assemblies in a web of life.