 Finally, the self’s appearance in immunology served as a readily understood shorthand reference to personal identity, and the efforts to substantiate that extrapolation on its own terms guided the discipline for the latter half of the twentieth century (for historical case studies see Löwy 1991). After all, beyond the experimental science, the interpretative context of immune selfhood draws from wider social meanings of individuality and insularity (Tauber 2016; see below, section 5.0). The autonomous construction of identity resonates with Western civic ideals and in turn supports them by melding laboratory findings with various extrapolated or borrowed philosophical, political and psychological formulations of human agency. And conversely, immunology has been studied as a source of important metaphors and other tropes feeding back on the science’s supporting culture to transform understanding of agency and communal relationships (discussed below, section 5.0).