Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay,<i>Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intolerant Bodies is an engaging and multi-faceted narrative of persistence, of metaphysics in the face of molecularisation, of individuation despite institutionalisation, and (not least) of authorship in the increasingly amorphous field of authority. Its frequent invocation of immunology's postmodern resonances makes this book a somewhat awkward fit within the publisher's ‘biographies of disease’ series. Eschewing the modernist alliance of identity and truth, the authors elect to narrate not one disease, but four, simultaneously (type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis). The subsequent story is not one of identity emerging from multiplicity (a plotline practically demanded by the disease biography genre), but of the conditions of possibility of a new thought: namely, that the body's defences against disease could themselves constitute disease. The authors make clear that this thought is not that of the diminution or exaggeration of immunity (codified by HIV-AIDS on the one hand and allergy/anaphylaxis on the other), but of a complete ‘reframing’ of the immune self that paradoxically places autoimmunity at the organism's physiological core by the end of the twentieth century (pp. 116–38). The authors point out that this is more a biological than a pathological conceit. And yet it is also highly idiosyncratic, and bound to clinical and investigative practices. In contrast to the discovery of red blood cell antigens that led to ABO blood typing and related questions regarding the nature of species and specificity, the dynamics of human leucocyte antigens on the white blood cells and other tissues laid out how a biological individual could be actively construed out of the immune interactions of cell populations (eventually defined as the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC).1 The clinical expressions of self-reactivity thus emerged as an assumed, but relatively rare, risk demanded by the existence of the biological individual. Self-antigenicity became an integral (and typically subclinical) part of normal immunological surveillance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".