The Immunological Self: A reappraisal

Among the most important theories of modern biological thought, the concept of immune self appeared as a tacit assumption in the speculations of cellular pathologists and physiologists in the second half of the Nineteenth century. Thanks to its first conceptualization advanced by Burnet in the 1950's, immune self gained the central stage during the "golden age of immunology" from 1960 to 1980, just to come up with a recent crisis because of its lack of explanatory power of emergent phenomena such as inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The following discussion of the immune self history, together with a reassessment of recent experimental data, will suggest a further conceptual turn in the immune self theory that we propose to refer to as "Liquid Self".