seemed symbolic of his devotion to his work.
He oversees a handful of researchers in a lab that is one of about forty on a campus that also includes a vaccine manufacturing facility to support the army’s own clinical trials. “They do the work and I write it up. That’s all I do is write,” he said, referring to both medical journals and the grants that must be written to request funds.
“One of the things that is different about us,” emphasized Ann Stewart, “is that our focus is on the adult military traveler. But most of the interest today is on children in Africa, and frankly that’s probably what really motivates most of the people who work here.”
The military only funds about one-third of the work at Walter Reed. The rest comes from donors or partnering companies.
It would be hard to picture two greater opposites than David Lanar and Stephen Hoffman. Both made their way to the vaunted London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Harvard of tropical disease, and joined the military to pursue a passion, but the similarities end there. Lanar is an institutional man, trading independence and potential notoriety for the security and resources the army can provide. Hoffman, neat and trim, politically deft, has to run his own show. Impatient with conventional wisdom and the confines of institutional processes, he is the classic entrepreneur, unleashed, a jay walker, making his own rules as he goes, undeterred by others’ definitions of possible and impossible.
“Steve’s a smart guy,” Lanar told me. “He used to work right here. But what he’s trying won’t work.”
A MASTER SPY’S MICROSCOPIC TRADECRAFT
“I’ve always been a bit of a spectrometrist,” professor Paul Roepe confided to me in the privacy of his office, just as one might admit, but play down, an unusual fetish or eccentricity. It was his way of explaining how, as a Ph.D. physicist turned molecular chemist and cellular biologist, he’d ended up inventing a revolutionary process for determining how deadly parasites became drug resistant—for actually seeing
the treachery their molecules committed inside of red blood cells.
If Steve Hoffman and other vaccine developers are the generals of the malaria battlefield plotting the best strategy for repelling invasion, then Roepe is director of central intelligence. His reconnaissance critically informs where to fight and what weapons to use. Roepe and his colleagues designed the equipment that enables us to spy on the parasite. Though technologically complex, it is based on spectroscopy, which measures the diffusion of light.
Observing the malaria parasite is essential to understanding both how to stop it and how it resists being stopped. The malaria parasite is so tiny that it is extraordinarily difficult to observe. It grows inside of individual red blood cells that have a diameter of about 7 microns. A micron is one ten-thousandth of a centimeter. And the parasite itself isn’t even a micron in diameter.
The ability to resist the drugs that are developed to defeat it has enabled the parasite to survive for tens of thousands of years. This ability is shared by other parasites as well as bacteria, tumors, and other diseases. Consequently, the intelligence Dr. Roepe is gathering is coveted by leading medical experts in every field and will almost certainly have long-term applications to cancer, methicillin-resistant staph infections, HIV/AIDS, and the like.
His third-floor office was sandwiched between several small, busy labs at Georgetown University’s Basic Science Building. On the door was taped a scrap of white paper that
said “2 million children die of malaria every year.” Next to it was a copy of an obituary for Arthur Kornberg, a mentor of Roepe’s and a Nobel Laureate whose work studying enzymes helped scientists manufacture cells and create the field of biotechnology. On the wall inside were drawings from Roepe’s son and daughter, aged nine and
He oversees a handful of researchers in a lab that is one of about forty on a campus that also includes a vaccine manufacturing facility to support the army’s own clinical trials. “They do the work and I write it up. That’s all I do is write,” he said, referring to both medical journals and the grants that must be written to request funds.
“One of the things that is different about us,” emphasized Ann Stewart, “is that our focus is on the adult military traveler. But most of the interest today is on children in Africa, and frankly that’s probably what really motivates most of the people who work here.”
The military only funds about one-third of the work at Walter Reed. The rest comes from donors or partnering companies.
It would be hard to picture two greater opposites than David Lanar and Stephen Hoffman. Both made their way to the vaunted London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Harvard of tropical disease, and joined the military to pursue a passion, but the similarities end there. Lanar is an institutional man, trading independence and potential notoriety for the security and resources the army can provide. Hoffman, neat and trim, politically deft, has to run his own show. Impatient with conventional wisdom and the confines of institutional processes, he is the classic entrepreneur, unleashed, a jay walker, making his own rules as he goes, undeterred by others’ definitions of possible and impossible.
“Steve’s a smart guy,” Lanar told me. “He used to work right here. But what he’s trying won’t work.”
A MASTER SPY’S MICROSCOPIC TRADECRAFT
“I’ve always been a bit of a spectrometrist,” professor Paul Roepe confided to me in the privacy of his office, just as one might admit, but play down, an unusual fetish or eccentricity. It was his way of explaining how, as a Ph.D. physicist turned molecular chemist and cellular biologist, he’d ended up inventing a revolutionary process for determining how deadly parasites became drug resistant—for actually seeing
the treachery their molecules committed inside of red blood cells.
If Steve Hoffman and other vaccine developers are the generals of the malaria battlefield plotting the best strategy for repelling invasion, then Roepe is director of central intelligence. His reconnaissance critically informs where to fight and what weapons to use. Roepe and his colleagues designed the equipment that enables us to spy on the parasite. Though technologically complex, it is based on spectroscopy, which measures the diffusion of light.
Observing the malaria parasite is essential to understanding both how to stop it and how it resists being stopped. The malaria parasite is so tiny that it is extraordinarily difficult to observe. It grows inside of individual red blood cells that have a diameter of about 7 microns. A micron is one ten-thousandth of a centimeter. And the parasite itself isn’t even a micron in diameter.
The ability to resist the drugs that are developed to defeat it has enabled the parasite to survive for tens of thousands of years. This ability is shared by other parasites as well as bacteria, tumors, and other diseases. Consequently, the intelligence Dr. Roepe is gathering is coveted by leading medical experts in every field and will almost certainly have long-term applications to cancer, methicillin-resistant staph infections, HIV/AIDS, and the like.
His third-floor office was sandwiched between several small, busy labs at Georgetown University’s Basic Science Building. On the door was taped a scrap of white paper that
said “2 million children die of malaria every year.” Next to it was a copy of an obituary for Arthur Kornberg, a mentor of Roepe’s and a Nobel Laureate whose work studying enzymes helped scientists manufacture cells and create the field of biotechnology. On the wall inside were drawings from Roepe’s son and daughter, aged nine and
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