Disease Squad
WINKLER, CLAUDIA
Disease Squad Richard Rhodes Chronicles a Scientific Hunt By Claudia Winkler For decades, across continents and disciplines, an unusual parade of men and women has been working to unravel the...
...The winner of a Pulitzer prize for his justly acclaimed Making of the Atomic Bomb in 1986, he expresses a breathless anger at politicians, especially those of a conservative stripe, who did not invariably choose the most radical precautions when mad cow disease appeared...
...serendipity and strategy...
...She took the brain back with her and three weeks later cabled NIH: Georgette's pathology was indistinguishable from human kuru...
...She began to withdraw, with a vacant look in her eyes...
...inspiration and painstaking work...
...In the 1980s, mad cow disease would present British politicians and regulators with the challenge of curbing a poorly understood epidemic and protecting human health from dangers more potential than known...
...Gibbs chose never to study a human kuru patient so as to keep his observations of the animals uninfluenced by anything he had previously seen...
...A jigsaw-puzzle aficionado, pragmatic and grounded and impatient with abstraction," she eventually found minute formations she called "scrapie-associated fibrils...
...And finally, Gajdusek's career was derailed by his arrest in April 1996 for molesting an adopted son, to which he pleaded guilty in February...
...The incidence of new-variant Creutzfeld-Jakob is expected to grow in the short term...
...The "deadly feasts" of the title are those by which some of these maladies were spread: ritual cannibalism in New Guinea, which was abandoned in the late 1950s, causing kuru to die out...
...Their policy choices should have been scrupulously informed by science...
...Gaj-dusek learned of kuru on a stopover in New Guinea in 1957 and trekked off into the highlands to begin what would become one of his several lifelong quests: to explain the causation of kuru and related diseases...
...Eventually a chimp named Georgette exhibited changes...
...Indeed, the book is marred by Rhodes's taste for the sensational and his overstatement of the probable danger to man...
...Her condition deteriorated steadily...
...By October, when she was sacrificed, she had to be fed by hand and could no longer walk...
...Towering above them all is Carleton Gajdusek, the National Institutes of Health research physician who led the assault on the mysterious New Guinean disease kuru, one of the two spongiform encephalo-pathies found in man...
...15 July 65...
...The interplay of personalities is fascinating...
...By the end of 1996, some 14 cases of a novel human spongiform encephalopathy had been confirmed in Britain and one in France...
...Gadjusek, Gibbs, Merz, and others were engaged in a search for knowledge that is the central drama of Deadly Feasts: the sequence of forming and testing alternative explanations for phenomena...
...Still, even worst-case estimates of where it could conceivably peak show Rhodes's invocation of the Black Death—which wiped out one third of Europe in the 14th century—to be silly...
...Given the long incubation period, the victims of this "new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob" were probably infected by beef products in the 1980s, before public-health counter-measures were in place...
...A few days later, another of the team, who had worked in New Guinea, summed up his observations with: "clinical impression—kuru...
...Georgette continued to decline...
...It was discovered that some recipients of corneal transplants or of Human Growth Hormone harvested from cadavers had been infected with the spongiform encephalopathy known as Creutz-feldt-Jakob...
...Yet the project's advancement required the contributions of others very unlike him...
...Fell off top of cage today...
...Patricia Merz studied brain cells through a hugely powerful electron microscope in a Staten Island lab...
...No sense of balance...
...They are now accepted as the distinctive mark of the spongiform en-cephalopathies—though even today the nature of the disease agent, its remarkable resilience, and its means of propagation have not been fully elucidated...
...If the threat is something short of apocalyptic, it is certainly real and demands to be more widely understood...
...This odd family of neurological ailments, fatal to several mammals including man, is of keen interest now because of mad cow disease...
...rivalry and cooperation...
...inevitably, they were also subject to economic and public-relations pressures...
...As he notes, a coming thing in medicine is the transplantation of animal organs and tissues into human beings...
...A specialized neuropathologist named Elizabeth Beck was flown in from England for the autopsy...
...Rhodes aficionados will detect here a minor theme of his work: He once wrote a novel about the Donner party, as well as an arresting childhood memoir of torture at the hands of a cruel stepmother, A Hole in the World, in which he recounted his stepmother's "cannibalizing" his identity...
...A deep rivalry developed between Gajdusek's lab and that of the ambitious Stanley Prusiner in San Francisco...
...Richard Rhodes's new book, Deadly Feasts, is a breezy, immensely readable account of the effort to solve the riddle of the spongiform en-cephalopathies...
...of pondering anomalies that cry out to be accounted for...
...More broadly, it is a splendid description of the process by which scientific knowledge is advanced...
...Doctors and patients contemplating such transplants will need to guard against the clear risk that procedures intended as therapeutic may transmit a near-indestructible agent of fatal disease from animals to man...
...Rhodes appears to favor policies designed to eliminate all risk regardless of cost, including in this country, where mad cow disease has never been found...
...As for whether mad cow disease actually has infected humans through their food, mounting evidence strongly suggests that it has, though the rate of transmission across species is low...
...Gaj-dusek was summoned home from New Guinea...
...Gibbs, in charge of the experiments testing whether kuru could be transmitted to animals, oversaw a menagerie of 10,000 mice, 75 monkeys, and 7 crucial chimpanzees in a disused dairy barn he renovated at a federal wildlife research center...
...Fell off stoop in cage...
...lust for recognition and selfless dedication...
...epidemic in Britain since 1985, has actually spread to humans through the food supply, a serious human epidemic may be in store...
...Kuru has an incubation period of years, so once the chimps had been carefully injected with a solution of kuru-dis-eased brain, it was a matter of waiting and watching...
...The latest scientific update, by Paul Brown and Leon G. Epstein in the March 1997 issue of Neurology, stresses the lack of any suitable model for assessing the future but concludes: "Predictions of a huge epidemic . . . are probably not justified...
...In just the last year, evidence has mounted that the leap across species boundaries has taken place...
...Sometimes she shivered...
...Clarence Gibbs is as rooted as the much-traveled Gajdusek is peripatetic: He still lives in the house his great-grandparents built in Washington, D.C...
...If indeed eating beef products has given the disease to humans, that becomes another deadly feast...
...Rhodes's account of the British authorities' almost cavalier bungling of the crisis is the weakest part of his book...
...and the feeding to cattle of protein supplements made from cattle remains, the "industrial cannibalism" that unwittingly fanned the epidemic in Britain before the government banned the practice in 1989...
...In the early 1960s, Gaj-dusek recruited Gibbs to take charge of the animal experiments that would show kuru to be an unconventional infectious disease transmissible to primates...
...But, as always, human weakness and human tragedy complicated matters...
...For days and months and years on end, she searched directly for the agent of disease...
...Disease Squad Richard Rhodes Chronicles a Scientific Hunt By Claudia Winkler For decades, across continents and disciplines, an unusual parade of men and women has been working to unravel the secret of the "spongiform encephalopathies...
...Appears to have the 'shakes.' Trembles at frequent intervals...
...Jaw hangs open constantly...
...Thirty years and a Nobel prize later, Gajdusek's theories and the work of the lab he directed at NIH until 1996 remain state of the art...
...If bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Claudia Winkler is managing editor of'The Weekly Standard...
...For this, Rhodes's book is a fine starting point, and his alarmism may usefully draw attention to the problem...
...Tremors continue...
...Embedded in this story are all the predictable components of complex endeavor: individual drive and institutional interest...
...Rhodes quotes from the lab assistant's notes: "14 July 65...
...Moving around very slowly...
...He was impressed, but he still harbored doubts...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 30
