How a wheel of cheese and a road trip changed the way scientists picture your body

In 1984, three immunologists spent seventeen hours together in a Volkswagen bus, traveling with a ripe wheel of Taleggio cheese and an Italian edition of Umberto Eco's book on semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. Somewhere along the drive, with the help of some rough translations from the Italian among them, they landed on an idea: maybe the cells of the body, like the humans who carry them, use something like a language to talk to each other. That conversation eventually produced a whole academic conference on what they called immunosemiotics.

Eula Biss found this story exciting for a specific reason. She hoped it meant a group of immunologists had gathered to examine their own metaphors, the images scientists use to describe what cells are actually doing. Instead, the conference turned out to be about how bodies interpret signals, not about language in the more poetic sense. But the underlying point still stands: immunologists cannot describe the immune system without metaphor. Cells 'remember,' 'recognize,' 'read,' and 'interpret' pathogens, language borrowed directly from human communication, because there's no other vocabulary available for what these cells actually do.

The anthropologist Emily Martin took this seriously enough to interview a wide range of people, scientists and non-scientists, about how they pictured their own immune systems. During the first Iraq war, she found that most people, across the board, reached for military language without hesitation: cells as infantry, antibodies as armored units, an immune response that 'detonates like a bomb.' Several of the scientists she spoke to insisted this wasn't a metaphor at all, but simply 'how it is.' Yet alternative medicine practitioners, as a group, consistently refused war language altogether. One lawyer described her immune system instead in terms of 'tides,' of ebb and flow, of balance rather than combat.

Why does this matter? Because Martin also found, and other researchers have shown separately, that the metaphor a person uses for the body quietly shapes how they think about other things entirely, including how they feel about immigrants and outsiders. A metaphor is never just decoration. It's a lens, and it changes what you see through it.

Pay attention, for one day, to the language you or people around you use for illness and immunity, whether it's fighting, invading, battling, or something gentler like balancing or tending. When you notice yourself reaching for war language about your body, try swapping in an image of balance or tending instead, and see whether your sense of dread shifts along with the words. In conversations about disease or vaccination, notice metaphors like 'invasion' or 'contamination,' and ask whether they're quietly pulling the conversation toward fear of outsiders rather than toward the actual biology. If you're explaining immunity to a child or a worried friend, choose your image deliberately, since whichever one you pick will shape how they feel about it long after the facts are forgotten.