On 26 june 2007 Mieke Van de Voort and Ab Osterhaus organized an internal presentation of their subject material in the Rijksakademie.

Ab Osterhaus usually employs the aid of powerpointpresentation or slides to illustrate his discourse. During the presentation at the Rijksakademie he was bereft of such equipment and was asked to creatively make use of the elements on the table instead.

Photography Roy Taylor
Abbreviations: A.O. -Ab Osterhaus; au -audience

(A.O.) To the simple question, is the virus alive? I think the proper answer [depends on the] definition of life [which] would be 'being able to replicate itself'. So I think a virus is not alive.

(A.O.) A virus (..) has a mechanism by which it can usually attach itself to the cell. There's a method of internalization, so it gets into the cell and what it does there and that is a unique thing to do, it actually starts to use the whole metabolism, the system of the cell, (..) to change it in such a way so that the cell starts to produce instead of its own DNA or RNA, proteins, (..) the proteins of the virus. And there's a whole lot of different viruses and they use different strategies to do this kind of thing.

(au) -Do you actually try to follow that [kind of] thought through; try to sometimes think, okay let's assume it [aids] is a conspiracy, or let's assume these things [influenza viruses] do come from outer space?
(A.O.) No, when we do science, basically what we do is formulate a hypothesis that we believe in ourselves. And it is very unlikely that [there is a conspiracy, or that they come from space], I would never pursue it.. It is difficult to proove it wrong, but you'd rather proove it [a thesis] right, something you believe in.

(au) -You would assume a virus wants to survive..
(A.O.) No, I dont think viruses want anything, it cannot want anything. I am always fascinated how smart viruses are, but of course they are not smart at all, but they have evolved in some way or the other to use all kinds of mechanisms that allow them to persist in the system..

(au) -What is the message you are trying to get across?
(A.O.) No message, I am not a prophet or anything
(...)
(au) -Are you trying to scare people into..
(A.O.) To a certain extent yes (...) I use fear.. I am blamed for being a scaremonger. I am not using fear proper. If you see movies, I don't take them seriously of course, but it is in those kinds of scenario's as well. But a flu-pandemic will be there, for sure and the question is will it be two million people who die, or 100 million..
(au) -These are statistics..

(au) -Is this not an ongoing fight with nature?
(A.O.) Of course, and we want to win the fight.. and if we win the fight we have too many people on this earth..
If you say, all these diseases are part of the game so we should not combat.. but also our brains, our intellect is part of the game and if we can combat it in a proper way, we should do that.


Last photo:
Sequence of stills taken from moviefragments shown as a projection. (Frank's transformation after he is infected. 28 Days Later, Danny boyle, 2002.)