Jeffery Taubenberger
Jeffery K. Taubenberger (born 1961 in
Training
Taubenberger was born in Germany, the third son of an Army officer. When he was nine he moved to a suburb of
The AFIP was one of more than a dozen tenant facilities located on the campus of the
A dolphin disease
The AFIP also worked on veterinary diseases. In the winter of 1987 half the population of
In the late 1980s
In search of the 1918 Spanish influenza virus
Fearing government cutbacks Taubenberger looked for an
The genome of the flu virus includes about 13,000 base pairs, which had decayed into pieces as small as 100 base pairs. In order to make PCR work, primers have to be constructed, i.e. a short bit of DNA with mirror sequences of the sequence at the two end points of the fragment. They bind to the fragment, and with the help of a polymerase bases are added between the primers to make a copy. The millions of copies of the gene segment are labelled with a radioactive probe as they are being made. They can then be separated on a thin gel by running an electric current across the gel. The radioactive labels create a black mark on an X-ray film which is put over the gel.
From serum tests of people who had witnessed the Spanish flu it was known that the virus had to belong to the H1N1 subtype. The team looked at all available sequences of influenza genes of this subtype to find out whether there were any parts of a given gene which were virtually identical. These were turned into primers. The first aim was to clarify whether any fragments of the flu virus were left in the tissue samples at all. The laboratory work was mostly done by Ann Reid and for more than a year she did not find anything. On 23 July 1996 Amy Krafft, whom she had turned to for help, got a positive result on a case from the 1957 influenza pandemic. That success led Reid to test more cases from 1918, with an eventual positive signal from tissue belonging to an army private named Roscoe Vaughan, who had died on 26 September 1918 at Camp Jackson, South Carolina from a pneumonia of the left lung. His right lung seems to have been a few days behind in the progression of the disease, so that the virus was still present on this side when he died.[3]
The sequence of a matrix gene did not match any known sequence exactly, so that a contaminant could be ruled out. In all, Taubenberger's team isolated nine fragments of viral RNA from five different genes. They decided to send their first publication to
Johan Hultin comes in
The March paper in Science was also read by Johan Hultin. In 1951 the pathologist had already tried to isolate the 1918 influenza virus from victims, who had been buried in the Alaskan permafrost. At what was called Teller Mission at the time, he had unearthed bodies but had failed to find any live viruses. He never finished his thesis. Now, with PCR available, he realized the time had come to try again.
In July 1997 he offered Taubenberger to return to what is now Brevig, Alaska. Again he received permission to dig for victims of the 1918 Spanish flu, and this time he unearthed the remains of an obese woman, maybe thirty years old, whom he christened “Lucy”. The fat had protected her lungs from decay, and he took both of them. It turned out that in Lucy's case the fragments were even smaller – around 100 base pairs as compared to 150 in the case of Vaughan and Downs – but now there was enough material to sequence the complete 1918 virus many times over. Taubenberger and Reid managed to generate a complete haemagglutinin sequence to confirm the one they had got from Vaughan. In all three cases – Vaughan, Downs, and Lucy – the 1,800 base pairs differed only in a few places. This was the best confirmation that the sequence of the 1918 haemagglutinin had actually been found.[5]
In a series of papers the team published the complete
Stranger than fiction
Sometime in early 1998 Taubenberger received a manuscript from a novelist who had recently contacted him. Dr. Stephen Carter had discovered Taubenberger's work through the paper in Science, and he wanted to know whether Taubenberger would be interested in reading the first draft of a novel in which an ambitious vaccine biotechnology company known as Immunological Technologies resurrects the 1918 Spanish flu virus in secrecy in its state-of-the-art facility in San Diego, California. The book had taken almost three years to research and write, and Carter was looking for someone to critique the scientific elements. Jeffery Taubenberger seemed the perfect candidate.
To Carter's surprise Taubenberger agreed to read the hefty manuscript despite his workload. But it was not the scientific aspects of the story that Taubenberger responded to most strongly, it was the naval scenes set in the Pacific. Taubenberger thought that there were unresolved plot lines involving the naval carrier task force that played a central role in the escalating international conflicts in the book, later published as Ninth Day Of Creation. Carter relented and added a new section to the book involving a battle scene between a U.S. naval aircraft carrier and an advanced Chinese nuclear attack submarine.
Taubenberger then agreed to be interviewed by Carter about his ongoing work with the sequencing of the 1918 strain. Where was the research likely to lead, would the 1918 strain ultimately be reconstructed, and did Taubenberger have any reservations about publishing the gene sequences for a killer strain of flu? The interview was conducted and placed online in March 1998 as "An Interview With Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger".
Personal interests
Jeffery Karl Taubenberger was born in the US Army hospital in Landstuhl but to a German father and US-born mother. His father Heinz Karl Taubenberger was a well-known figure skater in his youth, and was Germany's junior champion several times both in pair-skating and men's singles in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In his free time Taubenberger is a woodwind player – oboe, English horn, clarinet; but his interest has mainly been composition. In 1981 he created his first opus, the operetta The Wayward Prince, lyrics with Andrew Russo. The overture was performed by the George Mason University Orchestra in July 1982 with Taubenberger as conductor. In 1984 he wrote a "Symphony in D minor", from which he performed two movements with the Richmond Community Orchestra in the same year with Taubenberger conducting. Further work includes two lieder for tenor and piano on poems by Goethe (1985–1986), two woodwind quintets (1987& 1988), and a string quartet in G major (1990), which was performed the same year by Columbia String Ensemble and in 1995 again by the Gallery Quartet. Next came eight two-part inventions for solo piano (1994), a string quartet in E minor (1997), and "Daydreams", a symphonic tone poem for large orchestra (2000). He is currently working on a symphony in C major (since 2005) and a string quartet in B minor (2007). With work and family obligations he finds extremely little time for composing.
Taubenberger is married and has two children.
Taubenberger is a second cousin to former Philadelphia mayoral candidate Al Taubenberger.
References
- ^ "Jeffery Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution, Infectious Diseases Lab". Archived from the original on 2015-09-19. Retrieved 2015-09-14.
- ^ Taubenberger, Jeffrey (April 28, 2009). "NIAID Lab Attacks Flu From Different Directions". National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Archived from the original on March 11, 2014. Retrieved September 4, 2022.
- ^ Closing in on a Killer: Scientists Unlock Clues to the Spanish Influenza Virus (exhibit at National Museum of Health and Medicine, 1996) http://www.medicalmuseum.mil/index.cfm?p=exhibits.1918killerflu.index
- ^ Jeffery K. Taubenberger, Ann H. Reid, Amy E. Krafft, Karen E. Bijwaard, Thomas G. Fanning. “Initial Genetic Characterization of the 1918 'Spanish' Influenza Virus”, Science, Vol. 275, No. 5307 (1997), pp. 1793-1796.
- ^ Fernandez, Elizabeth (17 February 2002). "The Virus detective / Dr. John Hultin has found evidence of the 1918 flu epidemic that had eluded experts for decades". The San Francisco Chronicle.
- ^ Reid, A. H., Fanning, T. G., Hultin, J. V. & Taubenberger, J. K. “Origin and evolution of the 1918 'Spanish' influenza hemagglutinin gene”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 96 (1999), pp. 1651-1656.
Reid, A. H., Fanning, T. G., Hultin, J. V. & Taubenberger, J. K. “Characterization of the 1918 'Spanish' influenza neuraminidase gene”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97 (2000), pp. 6785-6790.
Basler, C. F. Et al. “Sequence of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus nonstructural gene (NS) segment and characterization of recombinant viruses bearing the 1918 NS genes”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 98 (2001), pp. 2746-2751.
Reid, A.H., Fanning, T.G., Janczewski, T.A., McCall, S. & Taubenberger, J.K. “Characterization of the 1918 'Spanish' influenza virus matrix gene segment”, Journal of Virology, vol. 76 (2002), pp. 10717-10723.
Reid, A.H., Fanning, T.G., Janczewski, T.A., Lourens, R. & Taubenberger, J.K. “Novel origin of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus nucleoprotein gene segment”, Journal of Virology, vol. 78 (2004), pp. 12462-12470.
Taubenberger, J.K., Reid, A. H., Lourens, R. M., Wang, R., Jin, G. & Fanning T. G. “Characterization of the 1918 influenza polymerase gene”, Nature, vol. 437 (2005), pp.889-893
Sources
- Davies, Pete (1999). Catching cold: 1918's forgotten tragedy and the scientific hunt for the virus that caused it. London: Michael Joseph. ISBN 0-7181-4349-3.
- Illus with photos; Kolata, Gina Bari (2000). Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN 0-333-75105-1.
- Closing in on a Killer: Scientists Unlock Clues to the Spanish Influenza Virus (exhibit at National Museum of Health and Medicine, 1996)