The fears, exaggerated or not, lit a fire under administration officials. DARPA was already interested in vaccines and other countermeasures against bio-weapons, but the new emphasis gave scientists new money and new leverage in pursuing ambitious projects. "You hype the current threat to meet a future threat," Preslar says.
She adds that the political will is there and the money is coming, making the future of vaccinology a bright one. Within a quarter century, it would be possible to vaccinate the U.S. citizenry against potential attack, she says, if the public and the government support it. But even in best-case scenarios like Preslar's, when people are confident in vaccines and the money is there to mass-produce them, populations still wouldn't be fully protected against new disease agents. "Will it deter all possible threats? No, because there are the crazies. But the crazies probably do not have the technology to keep ahead of the vaccine curve."
Brian Stauffer
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Mark Graham
Russian scientist Alexander Chepurnov--in a borrowed lab coat--prepares to administer a genetic vaccine to a lab rat at UT Southwestern's Center for Biomedical Inventions. Chepurnov will return to Siberia's Vector lab to test the potential Ebola vaccine on guinea pigs.
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But some detractors of vaccine programs have also skewered the idea that scientists can keep up with countermeasures to biologically engineered agents. What's the point of inoculating yourself against anthrax when an enemy also has plague, Ebola, or tuberculosis in his mortar shells? And what's the point of inoculating against those diseases if they can be genetically modified to beat the vaccines?
What doctors need is a drug that can attack anything. They must find a way to shore up a victim's defense until the bug can be identified and countered.
Seeing this niche, Johnston and others are concentrating on the idea of a nonspecific shot that would crank up a subject's immune system to counter any biological threat. The idea is being explored in many labs--a race to create the ultimate immune-system enhancer.
At Dallas' CBI, efforts are concentrated on Parapox, a naturally occurring disease that infects sheep. In humans it causes harmless scabs on the skin that fall off in two to four weeks if not treated. Contraction of the disease boosts the innate immune system of humans to soaring levels, leading researchers to believe that it could be the basis for an all-purpose pill that could protect soldiers--or citizens--just before or after exposure to a lethal agent.
"It's an innate response, and no one knows exactly what it's doing," Johnston says. "There seems to be no side effects from turning up your innate immune system."
Alexandra Dadaeva's business card has two sides--one side written in Russian, the other in English. Her professional ties to the United States are getting tighter.
She apologizes to the crowd of scientist-spectators at the Center for Biomedical Inventions for her halting English and embarks on the description of the Ebola experiments, the topic of her recent seminar. An overhead projector shows color-coded graphs of the virus' impact on various animals. The progression of the disease, and of suspected vaccines, is shown not through graphic images but through numbers, data. It is her first international seminar.
She reads from a sheet of paper held with unpainted fingers. Words slip through the dual language barriers of Russian and science-speak; "fatal outcome," "lethal challenge," and "hemmoraghic fever." One chart reads "Day Nine: Death." Some in the audience, mostly younger lab staffers in the back, drift off to sleep during the speech.
They awaken during the Q & A. All of a sudden they are alert. Dadaeva's canned speech becomes a discussion about the cause of Ebola and the introduction of Ebola to the animals.
At one point, Dadaeva confesses that Vector has a tough time obtaining monkeys for tests. According to published reports from defectors, there was a time when the Russian scientists on staff would joke about stealing the monkeys' fresh fruit because the animals ate better than the staff. Now they can't afford any on which to conduct tests.
"The problem now is that there isn't enough money," Chepurnov explains later. "We can't pay the people we have, and people with a good education won't work there."
It is hard to believe Dadaeva's humble presentation is the new wave in Russian-U.S. harmony, the product of a million political and diplomatic miracles. But it's a small slice of Cold War history, the kind of minor meeting of the minds that propels entire nations toward peace, or war. It was boring and dramatic, all at once.
