“Transplant is the parent and sibling of immunology,” Dr. Markmann told me when we spoke about the history. Transplantation and immunology are siblings because a transplant—whether of skin or an immune system—can’t work if the body rejects the transplant as “alien.” And transplantation is also immunology’s parent because the failure of the body to accept human or animal tissue was one of the clearest, earliest signs that something in our bodies was rejecting and attacking tissues that seemed so similar.
