Viruses for All

The more public a scientific panel discussion is the more boring it tends to be. People are so polite to each other, that if you go to too many of these you start wanting the intellectual equivalent of Jerry Springer rather than Oprah Winfrey. This is not because I love fights, though I sort of do (boxing is my favorite sport after all), but because there is controversy and disagreement in nearly every area of science. In technical conferences where there are 100 people in attendance, people feel free to debate. In more public forums, they are cautious. Luckily for me, this doesn’t seem to be the case with the topic of devastating pandemic research. Last night at The New York Academy of Sciences, Ian Lipkin, of infection disease fame, and the chief science advisor on the film “Contagion”, moderated a panel to discuss the implications of the recent H5N1 controversy. It would be hard for anyone to have missed this basic issue, as the media has picked it up fairly broadly, so I won’t go into in detail here. The main issue in summary is that a group of scientists, Dr. Fouchier and coauthors, created a form of influenza in ferrets which some say has the potential to spread to humans. That is the H5N1. The paper was submitted for publication in the world’s top two journals “Science” and “Nature”, and the paper sent on to a group called the NSABB which reports biology risks to the government. Because of the seriousness of the information on how to perform this experiment was deemed too risky, the paper was not published, and a 60 day waiting period on doing any further research on H5N1 was put in  place while policy can be discussed. On the panel at NYAS were members of NSABB, well know Virologists, the Editors of both Nature and Science, and others. It was world class. Most importantly it was a debate that oscillated between the practical and philoshophical scientific responsibility, public health and progress. Carl Zimmer writes about the details of the conversation here.

I am adding my two cents as I often do, as an outsider. I am a scientist, I have written peer reviewed papers, but I know practically nothing about infectious disease. Yet when I hear about censorship to protect civilisation I pay attention. Shouldn’t we trust the experts who say better safe than sorry? Also shouldn’t there be expert arbiters of the information, so that bioterrorists, or just dummies who want to try it cannot kill 500 million people, even by accident? I have come to the conclusion that there should not. This is not a case of free speech style censorship exactly, it is a case of scientific progress, and if there is anything we have been learning in recent years it is that scientific innovation is itself viral.

As I just said, I am not a biologist, even by hobby, but lately I have been working with biologists, and very good ones at that, for two reasons. The first is that I specialize in the  very specific field of polymer rheology. In general this is the study of how materials flow. In my case specifically it is how small particles behave inside materials as they flow. This is usually synthetic material, but we are finding that flow in cells and mechanisms for drug delivery behave similarly and often well with the materials I study. So as a polymer rheologist I may not be inventing a cure, but I might be able to help with specific problems, which I have been doing. The other area where I have been peripherally involved in medical research is with a product the company I am CEO of, Nanotronics Imaging, is working on. We do rapid high resolution, high throughput microscopy and detection of features. This makes it possible for neuroscientists to identify neurons faster and with greater accuracy than other methods. It also helps scientists developing bioscaffolding  to avoid issues of contamination. All of this is to say that someone, myself, who knows nearly nothing about biology can still contribute. My guess is that there are thousands of people like me working in either academic labs in non biological departments, scientists who work in industry or even amateurs who are involved in the DIY movement of research. All of these can be ignored at first glance, because the risk associated with particular pathogens is so great, but I don’t think they should be. I think that by modern standards most of the great discoveries were made by people outside of the established discipline they were working in. There wasn’t officially physics before Newton, just Nature Philosophy. There was not molecular biology before Watson and Crick, just biology. The list goes on and I speak of this a lot in other blogs. The point is that a system, whether it is a nanoparticle of carbon, or a virus have similar qualities, and for me the expert in the nanoparticle should have access to the virus paper to contribute, as much as the virologist. In any field we cannot become so arrogant as to think the information is so complex or dangerous that it should be guarded by a few, just because it has been those few who have guarded it before.

Eventually H5N1 will be available for everyone to see. Already the panel estimates that over 1000 people have read the paper. Someone is bound to go public with it. Because of this, it is important that we boldly go public with it not guard it as if our government with a panel of a few experts are the only ones that can share in this. It is bound to make other countries, and other scientists angry. Angry people with a deadly virus is a lot worse than well meaning scientists with a deadly virus. It is true that this will likely scare a lot of the population, but the population is easily scared. That is part of our popular cultural identity. In this case it is scarey. The thing is though, it is much scarier if all of the worlds smart people aren’t working on solutions, than it is if only a few are.

Of Mice and Americans

In 2005 I was recovering from cancer. I was extremely tired, and bald from Chemotherapy, with a baby, who despite my wonderful wife and day care workers taking care of her most of the time, left me drained. I was also, as is normal, susceptible to catching colds and flu's. After the chemo seemed to work, I still couldn't travel much, as my immune system was compromised, so I had to, for the first time in my adult life, a chance to work on projects from New York, without flying or driving several times per week. Mostly I wanted to get strong, and do some creative work. My family company rented an apartment, which would serve as an office for me while I was stuck in treatment and recovery. In that same apartment was a Crunch fitness club, where I immediately joined. My goal was to regain physical shape, and actually be in better shape than I ever was before, and be creative and productive in the apartment, working on new inventions, a Ph.d dissertation and writing poetry. I was boxing every day with a trainer, then doing research, and writing every afternoon, while still having plenty of time for taking a nap, or reading a magazine. I managed to recover from the cancer and the treatment, get a Ph.d. and do the most creative work I had ever done.
This past week a very telling study was published in the New York Times (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/phys-ed-does-exercise-boost-immunity/?em) on mice regarding immunity and exercise. Three samples of mice were tested. All three were exposed to a type of flu virus that very dangerous for mice. The mice were given three distinct lifestyles while during their exposure to the virus. The first did not exercise, the second exercised very vigorously and the third did some light exercise. The basic findings may not be so surprising, but I think they are important. The mice who caught the virus most severely were the ones that did a very hard workout. The mice who didn't exercise at all did fine. Those who exercised moderately however had the highest health and survival rate. I like reading biology research, but it is sometimes very hard for me to think of these poor animals on this trial. Yes, the research is important, but is the method by which the results were obtained humane? I usually think it is worth it, and in this example it certainly does seem to lead us down an interesting path. Perhaps it will be possible to define the perfect amount of exercise to keep our immune systems strong enough to fight flues.
After reading this story, from France where I am living this year, I thought about that time in my life when I was a running mouse, trying to obtain the right amount of physical activity to keep me healthy, while not pushing myself into the grave even faster. What immediately occurred to me, is that while this study is real science, and what I am thinking is conjecture and experiential, Americans are very much like those two sickly groups of mice. The unique quality of my post cancer life was that it had leisure and tranquility, as well as exercise. For those few months I was the healthy mouse, exercising and relaxing, and avoiding illness.
So what about me, and my fellow Americans during the times when we are either recovering from cancer, or living in the socialist paradise of France? We are either rushing through the labor camp of a pressurized society, which has increased its productivity, but not increased the wages and benefits for most citizens. We eat while working or driving. We eat too much. And we are fat and sick. Or, we do something else entirely. We realize that we have nice athletic clubs, so we pay a lot of money to join them. We then push ourselves to look like our movie stars and models. We become in essence the over worked mouse, and we may look strong but also get sick. It seems that it is only with the extremes of forced vacation, or strict labor laws that we can become the healthy mouse.
So, after thinking all of this through I need to revisit my worries about the rather inhumane nature of animal testing. Perhaps the testing on mice is actually analogous to the way people in our society are treated. It is not just the clichéd "rat race" of business life, but rather the forced labor of existence, which may very well lead to shorter lives. The main reason the health care argument continues with such controversy in the United States, is perhaps because there are so many contributing factors to why we are so much less healthy, and rank so much lower than the rest of the industrialized world in life expectancy. It likely does have something to do with health care. It also though may go deeper into lifestyle. Maybe we are running ourselves physically and mentally to a premature death. This is a stretch, but from my own experience I felt more alive just after almost dying. This wasn't existential, or spiritual. It was mental and physical. Maybe after all the cruelest trials are being run on us every day.