http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/09/30/national/VIRUSHUNT30.htm
Sunday, September 30, 2001
IRVINE, Calif. - Ian Lipkin pulls
a printout from an Internet site where doctors around the world report
on infections that have them mystified.
"These things come out all day long,"
said Lipkin, head of the Emerging Diseases Laboratory at the University
of California, Irvine. "No one has any idea how to deal with [them]."
Lipkin, who founded the lab at UC
Irvine in 1990, is an explorer who, along with other researchers, hunts
for unidentified microbes, trying to figure out which illnesses are caused
by which viruses.
It was Lipkin who, in 1999, identified
West Nile virus, previously unknown in the United States, as the cause
of the encephalitis outbreak that killed seven people in the New York City
area.
The discovery catapulted the UC Irvine
physician and professor of neurobiology into the scientific spotlight and
sent him to Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and across the United States,
attending conferences and collaborating with other researchers.
The West Nile discovery was the kind
of research Lipkin thrives on, delving into the mysterious world of disease
and turning up a cause.
Working at the frontier of molecular
biology, he seeks microbes he believes are responsible for a number of
chronic diseases, including multiple sclerosis, autism, Alzheimer's and
depression.
But in his Irvine office, a weathered
leather doctor's bag sits on a bookshelf and cardboard boxes are stacked
in the corner, boxes he is packing to move to Columbia University. There,
he will join the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health, drawn
by the more extensive facilities the Ivy League school can offer and the
closeness of premier researchers in New York.
"He's a star," said Allan Rosenfield,
dean of the Mailman School. "His work on West Nile is just one indication
of the high caliber of work he's engaged in."
Lipkin is an attractive recruit for
any university. At 48, he has a reputation for cutting-edge research. He
is a compulsive worker, who often toils through the weekends.
"He calls me up at all hours of the
day and night, and is extremely dedicated to his subject," said David Relman,
a friend and professor of infectious diseases and microbiology at Stanford
University.
Lipkin grew up in Chicago, the son
of a psychiatrist. He received his bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence
College in New York, becoming one of the first men to spend four years
at what had been a women's school.
When Lipkin entered Sarah Lawrence,
he was interested in mythology, philosophy and cultural anthropology and
curious about other parts of the world. But his organic chemistry professor
made the subject come so alive that Lipkin turned to science.
Still, at that time, Sarah Lawrence's
only degree was a bachelor's in liberal arts.
When the 1974 graduate delivered
the commencement speech to Sarah Lawrence's Class of 2000, he told them,
"Many of the concepts I now use daily in molecular biology and neuroscience
are rooted in lessons learned" from his liberal arts studies.
He received his medical degree from
Rush Medical College in Chicago.
While he was a neurology resident
at UC San Francisco in the early 1980s, two things set the stage for his
career in what he calls "pathogen discovery." The first was the emergence
of patients diagnosed with the then-mysterious disease AIDS.
The second, he told the Sarah Lawrence
students, was the discovery of the prion, an infectious molecule in the
membranes of cells that is neither a bacterium nor a virus. Prions are
thought to spread mad cow disease.
Lipkin said he was inspired by the
discoverer of prions, Stanley Prusiner, a professor at UC San Francisco,
who "pursued an iconoclastic hypothesis in the face of public ridicule."
Prusiner received the Nobel Prize
for medicine in 1997.
Lipkin got involved in the search
for a disease that was killing people in New York when state officials
sent him brain samples of four who had died.
West Nile had caused encephalitis
in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, but until 1999, had not been identified
in the United States.
Most people infected with the virus
suffer flulike symptoms and recover. But the very young, the elderly and
those with damaged immune systems may be threatened.
By studying the genetic sequencing
of the virus, Lipkin identified West Nile as the cause of the encephalitis
outbreak.
He and his team then developed a
simple test to detect West Nile in a small sample of spinal fluid in just
five hours. Results from a previous test took three to four days.
Lipkin and his team won national
attention, and their main work was showcased: taking tissue and using techniques
of molecular biology to search for unknown viruses and bacteria, and determining
which diseases are caused by known microbes.
"When people can't figure out what's
going on, they get in touch with us," Lipkin said.
He calls it the Pandora's Box Program.
"Our hypothesis is we will discover
new agents by this approach," Lipkin said. "Until you know something exists,
how can you implicate it in a disease?"
For example, the causes of about
70 percent of encephalitis cases, an infection of the brain, are unknown,
"probably because it's being caused by viruses we don't know about," Lipkin
said.
By Jeff Gottlieb
LOS ANGELES TIMES