Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

Matzinger challenged the idea that the human body is as interested in “the self” as nineteenth-century

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

the immune response “is called into action by alarm signals from injured tissues, rather than by the recognition of nonself.”

A damaged cell will release damage-associated molecular patterns triggering inflammation.112 For example, an abundance of uric acid, a highly inflammatory molecule produced by cellular damage, creates the clinical syndrome known as gout.

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

The fifteenth century saw the simultaneous inauguration of European empire and the ascendency of a scientific worldview that objectified and diminished life and the natural world.

Metchnikoff’s seminal research identified what we now call the innate immune system, which reacts immediately to ancient molecular patterns that signal damage or infection. Inflammation and phagocytes are part of this first-responder branch. There are several immune cells that engulf things, but the hungry phagocyte that captured Metchnikoff’s imag

While fluoridation may have emerged in the 1940s as a low-cost public health intervention to manage working-class dental problems, today it is a billion-dollar subsidy for the fertilizer industry, in which hydrofluorosilicic acid is a by-product. This industrial waste has found a lucrative afterlife in water supplies around the world.

Acute inflammation can begin with an infection, when innate immune cells recognize molecular signatures found on the surface of bacteria, fungi, or viruses called pathogen-associated