The real “danger” lies in the failure to confront fundamentals

Abstract

Can we formulate a framework that would provide an agreed upon basis for discussions of immune behaviour? An attempt to do this is, in the end, the main goal of this essay. If you tell a physicist that you have invented a perpetual motion machine, he would not spend any time trying to reveal the flaw. Rather, he would shrug you off because in his framework, such a machine is an impossibility. However, immunologists lacking an agreed upon, preferably default, framework spend their time chasing into dead-end alleys or take refuge in descriptive empiricism. This will be illustrated using Danger theory, which ignores fundamentals to generate a framework believed to obviate the need for a Self (S)-Nonself (NS) discrimination and which is claimed to be bolstered with monogamous data (observation married to a single explanation). The arguments presented here apply to all NS-marker theories (pathogenicity, discontinuity, localization, danger, etc.).