
2009 - Lecture-performance
“Our whole immune system is there to defend our body from strange elements that could possibly harm us.
Sarah got in touch with Mr. Kroes a professor in virology at the university of Amsterdam on the subject of ‘the stranger’ in regard to the immune system. Mr. Kroes wrote:
….“The defining of what is ‘strange’ and what is ‘self’, is of crucial importance for the defence system of the host. This defining takes place in the early development of the immune system. On a certain moment and during a certain time, everything that becomes apparent, is being defined as belonging to the ‘self’. So everything that appears after that moment, is ‘strange’ (non-self) and gets attacked and destructed in several ways. So there is this very sharp moment of distinguishing. One can never predict which intruders will show up, it’s impossible to define them beforehand, you just have to assert:
the intruder is everything that is different than my self. Sometimes this goes wrong: people get very bad infections because they don’t recognise something as ‘strange’, or the other way around: some people attack their own textures because they think they are ‘strange’ (like in an auto immune disease)…”