“We get 10,000 samples a year easily,” Dr. Lipkin said. “We’ve discovered at least 400 new viruses since I came to Columbia in 2002, and the process is accelerating.”Watching AIDS cases in the 1980s, Lipkin decided that there must be a better way to find viruses. Sometimes scientists can detect viruses by rearing vast numbers of them in laboratories. It’s also possible to detect them by looking for antibodies in infected people. But these methods can be slow and unreliable. Dr. Lipkin thought it might be better to find viruses in a different way. He would go fishing for their genes.
“If scientists are lucky, they’ll identify one novel virus in their whole life,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Lipkin really stands out from the crowd.”
As Dr. Lipkin earned his reputation as a virus hunter, other researchers began to bring difficult cases to him. In 1999, for example, doctors noticed a cluster of cases of encephalitis around New York City. They shipped blood from their patients to Dr. Lipkin, who was then at the University of California, Irvine. Analyzing the genetic material, he and his colleagues concluded that the encephalitis had been caused by West Nile virus. It was the first time the virus had been identified in the Western Hemisphere. Since Dr. Lipkin made the discovery, West Nile virus has spread across the continental United States.Viruses don’t have to cause such horrific symptoms to have a major effect on people’s health. A number of studies indicate children are at higher risk of schizophrenia and autism if their mothers were infected by viruses during their pregnancy.
“There isn’t anybody any better at this than Ian Lipkin,” said Dr. Fauci. “If he can’t find it, it probably doesn’t exist.”
No comments:
Post a Comment