misleading, it is also entirely accurate.”
“Word games,” Hamelin said.
“Not at all,” Mudgett interposed. “We were going to spare
you the theoretical reasoning behind our project, Mr. Sec-
retary, but now you’ll just have to sit still for it. The fact is
that the body’s ability to distinguish between its own cells and
those of some foreign tissuea skin graft, say, or a bacterial
invasion of the bloodisn’t an inherited ability. It’s a learned
reaction. Furthermore, if you’ll think about it a moment,
you’ll see that it has to be. Body cells die, too, and have to be
disposed of; what would happen if removing those dead cells
provoked an antibody reaction, as the destruction of foreign
cells does? We’d die of anaphylactic shock while we were
still infants.
“For that reason, the body has to learn how to scavenge
selectively. In human beings, that lesson isn’t learned com-
pletely until about a month after birth. During the intervening
time, the newborn infant is protected by antibodies that it
gets from the colestrum, the ‘first milk’ it gets from the breast
during the three or four days immediately after birth. It can’t
generate its own; it isn’t allowed to, so to speak, until it’s
learned the trick of cleaning up body residues without
triggering the antibody mechanisms. Any dead cells marked
‘personal’ have to be dealt with some other way.”
“That seems clear enough,” Hamelin said. “But I don’t see
its relevance.”
“Well, we’re in a position now where that differentiation
between the self and everything outside the body doesn’t do us