Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Author:David Quammen [Quammen, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science, Health, Azizex666, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780393239225
Google: RMmxxYUBQhgC
Amazon: 0393066800
Barnesnoble: 0393066800
Goodreads: 13637215
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: 2012-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

66

Anderson and May were theoreticians who worked much with other people’s data. So is Edward C. Holmes. Unlike them, he’s a specialist in viral evolution, one of the world’s leading experts. He sits in a bare office at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, which is part of Pennsylvania State University, in a town called State College, amid the rolling hills and hardwoods of central Pennsylvania, and discerns patterns of viral change by scrutinizing sequences of genetic code. That is, he looks at long runs of those five letters, A, C, T, G, and U, strung out in unpronounceable streaks as though typed by a manic chimpanzee. Holmes’s office is tidy and comfortable, furnished sparsely with a desk, a table, and several chairs. There are few bookshelves, few books, few files or papers. A thinker’s room. On the desk is a computer with a large monitor. That’s how it all looked when I visited, anyway.

Above the computer hung a poster celebrating “the Virosphere,” meaning the unplumbable totality of viral diversity on Earth. Beside that, another poster showed Homer Simpson as a character in Edward Hopper’s famous painting “Nighthawks.” I’m not sure what that one was celebrating, unless perhaps donuts.

Edward C. Holmes is an Englishman, transplanted to central Pennsylvania from London and Cambridge. His eyes bug out slightly when he discusses a crucial fact or an edgy idea, because good facts and ideas impassion him. His head is round and, where not already bald, shaved austerely. He wears wiry glasses with a thick metal brow, as in old pictures of Yuri Andropov. Though shaved, though brilliant, though Andropovian at first glance, Edward C. Holmes isn’t austere. He’s lively and humorous, a generous soul who loves conversation about what matters: viruses. Everyone calls him Eddie.

“Most emerging pathogens are RNA viruses,” he told me, as we sat beneath the two posters. RNA as opposed to DNA viruses, he meant, or to bacteria, or to any other type of parasite. He didn’t need to cite the particulars about RNA viruses because I already had that list in my mind: Hendra and Nipah, Ebola and Marburg, West Nile, Machupo, Junin, the influenzas, the hantas, dengue and yellow fever, rabies and its cousins, chikungunya, SARS-CoV, and Lassa, not to mention HIV-1 and HIV-2. All of them carry their genomes as RNA. The category does seem to encompass much more than its share of dastardly zoonoses, including most of the newest and the worst. Some scientists have begun asking why. To say Eddie Holmes wrote the book on this subject wouldn’t be metaphorical. It’s titled The Evolution and Emergence of RNA Viruses, published by Oxford in 2009, and that’s what had brought me to his door. Now he was summarizing some of the highlights.

Granted, Eddie said, there are an awful lot of RNA viruses generally, which might seem to raise the odds that many would come after humans. RNA viruses in the oceans, in the soil, in the forests, and in the cities; RNA viruses infecting bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals.

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