| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Eva Harris Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 5 of 7
Which was the lucky pathogen that your research focused on?
Dengue virus, which was a whole issue, because, honestly, my training was in yeast and then parasites. I thought I'd go on with [parasites]; but dengue virus is exploding in Latin America, and there's very little work being done on it.
It's a devastating, chronic condition.
It's a virus that's transmitted by mosquitoes, and 2.5 billion people are at risk for this disease because of the distribution of the mosquito ... including the whole southeast of the United States, I might add. There are a 100 million cases of dengue fever annually, which is a very debilitating, although self-limited disease. There's a worse flavor of this same disease called dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. And that can be fatal, if untreated, and there's really only supportive treatment. We don't understand why some people get this devastating disease and others don't. There's very little research done, because it's not a U.S. problem for the most part.
It's caused by a mosquito?
It's transmitted by a mosquito; it's a virus that causes it. Everyone said, "Eva, work on this. You always said you were going to follow the urgency." I said, "I'm not a virologist"; then I said, "Well, I guess, I'm going to become one." You know, "Roll up your sleeves and let's do it." I decided to build the lab from scratch because nobody works on this virus in this area. It's all pretty much army, navy, CDC stuff, because it was originally in Southeast Asia; so there was military interest. I didn't want to work in a military environment. I decided to just start from scratch, and so I did.
All of this came together at the same time when I was being recruited by UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, on both the science platform and, to a certain degree, the international work. Although, truly what matters here is publications, grants, that's what you need to get tenure. So it's again, these two lives. I've had to split off the applied work to a large extent to be able to concentrate and create a basic research laboratory, where I can do the publications and research, and get the kind of grants that I need to maintain this setup at the university. For that reason, we founded a nonprofit organization, Sustainable Sciences Institute in San Francisco, to do a lot of the applied work.
With this dengue virus, the goal is to discover its workings so that it could ultimately be eradicated.
There are two things that we're working on. One is to have a resource base here, where, for instance, I'm co-director with a colleague in my division of an international research and training grant in emerging infectious diseases, which is one of the few training and international grants that the NIH supports. With that, we've been able to fund overseas projects for the first time in our lives. We have a number of our colleagues, scholars, come and visit the lab here and learn more and go back. So it's been really great, because I can see how much people can learn here. We are able to strengthen scientific capability overseas by rotating people through the lab here, which means you have to have a lab here. You have to be able to write the grants [for international work], and to do that, you need to have a basic research grant as the "parent grant." So there is a complicated strategic or logistic aspect to it.
What we do, also, is field work. We do field epidemiological studies, and we make new DNA-based techniques that will work under [resource-poor] conditions to type organisms. So this is the applied science aspect of my work. At the same time we try to understand, how does this virus work? How does the replication work? What kind of proteins can we target for anti-viral therapies? We're testing certain anti-viral compounds to see if they are effective against dengue virus. If we understand how the virus replicates, we can identify pieces of the virus which are important to knock out, to create an attenuated strain for a vaccine. So that is the basic science aspect.
Next page: Implications for Human Rights
© Copyright 2001, Regents of the University of California