Tag: microbiology

To celebrate TED 2011, which is taking place this week in Long Beach, California, we’re posting some of our favorite TED talks from Lavin Agency speakers.

Today, we hear from Nathan Wolfe, an extraordinary young scientist whose work has been featured in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone and on CNN.

The founder of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, Nathan Wolfe shares thrilling stories from his work in the jungles of Africa, where he and his team study viral infections in animals. If we can identify potentially deadly viruses before they are transmitted from animals to humans, Wolfe says, we can prevent the next AIDS-like outbreak. Wolfe’s talk reaches across disciplines, dealing not only with the cutting edge field of microbiology, but with how societal, economic, and political factors lead to the spread of disease. Wolfe and his team are still discovering and tracking dozens of viruses today. Their hope is that the threat of future global pandemics can be eliminated by stopping them at their source — before it’s too late.

Read more about keynote speaker Nathan Wolfe

Nathan Wolfe is working to thwart the next worldwide pandemic before it strikes. This week, The New Yorker profiles Wolfe as part of its 2010 World Changers issue. (Nathan was also a 2009 Rolling Stone Agent of Change—you can start to see a pattern emerge.) According to The New Yorker, Nathan looks “studiously disheveled,” like a cross between “a pirate and a graduate student.” But that’s cool, because he’s also “THE WORLD’S MOST PROMINENT VIRUS HUNTER.” A Stanford biologist, and the founder of Global Viral Forecasting, he carefully observes the spread of diseases among animals, and stops them before they tip into the human population. The article captures Nathan’s work, and his life, quite nicely. It features vivid you-are-there moments in the Cameroon jungles and a plea to change how we view pandemics. (Be preventative, rather than reactive, like with heart disease.) But this passage, below, late in the article, struck me most. It’s about why anyone would join Nathan in the jungles to sift through animal blood. It’s about why he’s not only a great scientist, but also a quietly amazing leader.

[Wolfe] has been able to recruit prominent scientists who are devoted to him. “Nathan inspires me and he inspires everyone we work with,’’ Joseph Fair, the organization’s chief science officer, told me when I met with him in Yaoundé. Like others on Wolfe’s team, Fair left a lucrative job to join the effort—and has never regretted his decision. “We work fifteen- hour days and on Saturdays and Sundays, and you do not get people to do that if they are not enthusiastic,’’ he said. “Nathan makes people feel very good about what they do. Nobody leaves.” (In 2008, Wolfe made a similar choice, walking away from a tenured position in epidemiology at U.C.L.A. to become a full-time virus hunter. “Try explaining that one to your Jewish mother,” he said.)