Leonard Read published “I, Pencil” in 1958. It has never been out of print.¹ It runs about 2,600 words and does something almost no essay does: it puts the argument in the mouth of the object under discussion. The pencil narrates its own genealogy. Read supplies no commentary. He does not need to. By the time the pencil has finished naming its cedar, its graphite, its brass, its factice, its lacquer, its labor, its factories, its ships, its lighthouses, and its coffee, the reader has arrived at Milton Friedman’s later summary without having been led there: no one in a central office ordered any of this, and yet all of it happened.
What follows is that essay’s structural mirror, applied to a different object.
The object is the MMR vaccine. It speaks in its own voice, which is to say it speaks in the vocabulary its manufacturer uses. It refers to measles and mumps and rubella. It refers to protection and immunity. It calls itself a vaccine. These are the terms in which its supply chain, its regulatory approval, and its schedule position are all described in the documents from which the vial was produced. Whether those terms describe biological reality is not the vial’s question and it is not this essay’s question. The essay’s question is only what the vial’s genealogy contains, and where that genealogy ends.
Read’s subtitle was “My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read.” This essay carries only “My Family Tree.” The device is his. The object is mine.
The vial speaks.
What I am
I am a vial of MMR-II. I contain three occupants: measles, mumps, and rubella. I am kept at a temperature between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. I am familiar to every mother in America, and to almost every child, though the child does not remember me by name. I sit in a small refrigerator in every pediatrician’s office in the country. My contents are drawn into a small syringe about fifteen minutes before I am needed. The syringe is then delivered subcutaneously into the upper arm or the outer thigh of a child, usually at 12 to 15 months of age, and again between 4 and 6 years.³
I am small. My glass shell is about three inches tall. My label carries a lot number, an expiration date, and the name Merck. I look, to any casual observer, unremarkable.
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