 These contrasting applications of social descriptions to immunology reveal the ease by which the science may be employed for culture criticism. But the exchange need not end with such contributions. Having been implemented in the discourse of science, the imagery borrowed from the culture-at-large becomes transformed and then returns to the social domain, impacting on portrayals of persons and their relationship with others (E. Martin 1994). On this view, the science-culture exchange broadens the implications of understanding the development of immune theory. For example, the political resonance of the self/nonself framework was evident in the context of a debate on tissue incompatibility, whose depiction as innate and unchangeable harmonized with Burnet and Medawar’s elitist sympathies and opposition towards social Lamarckism (Lafferty 1995). The vision of personhood that stood behind the self/nonself discrimination concept, can be further traced back to Burnet’s self-confessed “harmless terror of strangers” and his Darwinist vision of human relationships as defined by primordial selfishness and incessant drives towards domination and power (Burnet 1971: 12). Along with ongoing cultural and political transformations, our understanding of immune identity has also changed in the transition from a modernist vision of delineated selfhood towards a more complex view that dispenses with the self altogether. Thus, the imagery that is used to represent the activity of the immune system has deep roots in the broader culture that reflect dominant values and tensions defining the dialectics of the individual and her society. In sum, while immunology provides metaphors for characterizing human societies, the science in turn, draws from its supporting culture to model its biology. Here we see an explicit demonstration of the bi-directionality of social and scientific discourses, and to draw the line separating the laboratory from its supporting culture again proves problematic (Gieryn 1995).