“Is the immune system at the heart of a new incarnation of social Darwinism that allows people of different ‘quality’ to be distinguished from each other?” asks the anthropologist Emily Martin.

I had little confidence, consumer or otherwise, but I tended to believe that confidence was less important than the kind of trust that transcends the self.

“Vaccination works,” my father explains, “by enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.” He means the minority of the population that is particularly vulnerable to a given disease.

If we understand ourselves as living in a world of unseen evils, the immune system, that largely conceptual entity devoted to protecting us from invisible threats, will inevitably take on an inflated importance and a distorted function.

We are all “cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras,” as Haraway suggests in her feminist provocation “A Cyborg Manifesto.” She envisions a cyborg world “in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”

“Morality can’t be fully private,” my sister tells me, “for many of the same reasons that a language can’t be fully private. You can’t be intelligible only to yourself. But thinking of the conscience as a private sense of right and wrong suggests that our collective understandings of justice can be insufficient. An individual might resist flaws in

However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other’s environment. Immunity is a shared space—a garden we tend together.

“They aren’t blind,” my son says of moles, “they just can’t see.” The same could be said of humans.

We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us. We drive around in cars, a lot. We drink alcohol, we ride bicycles, we sit too much. And we harbor anxiety about things that, statistically speaking, pose us little danger. We fear sharks, while mosquitoes are, in terms of sheer numbers of lives lost, probably the most