"Our immune systeme does an incredible job"

She almost became a pianist. But when the young Jutta Horejs-Höck was unexpectedly accepted into the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, she realised: “This is not where I belong.” She chose medicine instead, and today she is a renowned immunologist.

Horejs-Höck is working to discover how exactly immune system cells communicate with each other. Knowing this will make it easier to understand why our natural defence system knows how to respond to attacks by bacteria, viruses or cancer cells. “The immune system does an incredible job in our everyday lives. But the coronavirus has shown us how much we still don’t know about it”, she notes.