Word: nonself
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...view of life. Nature is alive. The barest Antarctic rock is crawling with microbes. Viruses float on the dust. Bacteria help digest our food for us. According to modern evolutionary biology, our very cells are cities of formerly independent organisms. On the molecular level, the distinction between self and nonself disappears in a blur of semipermeable membranes. Nature goes on within and without us. It wafts through us like a breeze through a screened porch. On the biological level, the world is a seamless continuum of energy and information passing back and forth, a vast complicated network of exchange. Speech...
...short time later observed that the thorn had been completely surrounded by cells. The cells were phagocytes. "These little guys go back in evolution a very long way," says Carol Reinisch of the Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine. "They have the ability to distinguish between self and nonself, which is the crucial distinction...
...more devastating errors of the immune system involves its failure to distinguish between self and nonself, resulting in so-called autoimmune diseases, which can be crippling and sometimes fatal. Dozens of disorders that once mystified doctors are now thought to be autoimmune. Among them: Type 1 diabetes, myasthenia gravis, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. In these and other autoimmune diseases, the immune system mounts a selective and ferocious assault against parts of the body, destroying cells or cell components that it mistakenly identifies as alien...
...light in Arikha's paintings is dry and chalky. It conveys a sense of frugality, but with no question of expressionist pathos. His motifs are not actors in a drama of pathetic fallacy, but resistant fragments of the world, the nonself. But what is so gripping about his work is the in tensity with which Arikha engages that world. He speaks of the "hunger in the eye" that drew him away from abstract painting in 1965, and kept him doing nothing but black-and-white brush drawings and etchings from life for eight years. In his paintings since...
...defenseless against infection from without. But it was not until the early 1950s that Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet, an Australian, theorized that the way the body manages to cope with the enormous range of disease organisms is through its ability to recognize itself and to reject everything that is nonself (see box page...