Better Bananas, Nicer Mosquitoes the New York Times By
DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: December 6, 2005
SEATTLE - Addressing 275 of the world's
most brilliant scientists, Bill Gates cracked a joke:
"I've been applying my imagination to the synergies of this," he said. "We
could have sorghum that cures latent tuberculosis. We could have mosquitoes
that spread vitamin A. And most important, we could have bananas that never
need to be kept cold."
They laughed. Perhaps that was to be expected when the world's richest man,
who had just promised them $450 million, was delivering a punchline. But it was
also germane, because they were gathered to celebrate some of the
oddest-sounding projects in the history of science.
Skip to next paragraph Reuters
THE CHALLENGE Bill Gates has pledged $450 million to long-shot research
projects in global health.
Cassava Production
Disrupting the Mosquito's Sense of Smell
Without Refrigerators or Needles
Jean-Marc Bouju/Associated Press
Projects supported by the Gates Foundation include understanding immunity to
H.I.V. among Kenyan prostitutes.
Their deadly serious proposals - answers to the Grand Challenges in Global
Health that Mr. Gates posed in a 2003 speech in Davos, Switzerland - sounded
much like his spoofs: laboratories around the world, some of them led by Nobel
Prize winners, proposing to invent bananas and sorghum that make their own
vitamin A; chemicals that render mosquitoes unable to smell humans; drugs that
hunt down tuberculosis germs in people who do not even know they are infected;
and vaccines that are mixed into spores or plastics or sugars and can be
delivered in glasses of orange juice or modified goose calls.
What Mr. Gates had outlined at Davos were the greatest obstacles facing
doctors in the tropics: Laboratories are few and far between. Vaccines spoil
without refrigeration and require syringes, which can transmit AIDS. Mosquitoes
develop resistance to all insecticides. Crops that survive in the jungle or
desert often have little nutritive value. Infections outwit powerful drugs by
lying dormant.
His offer - originally $200 million, raised to $450 million after 1,600
proposals came in - "was to make sure that innovation wasn't reserved just for
big-ticket items like cancer and heart disease," said Dr. Carol A. Dahl, the
foundation's director of global health technologies, who ran the conference.
The winning teams, which were named in June,came from as far away as
Australia and China, withresearch partners all over Africa and Southeast Asia.
Over three days in a Seattle hotel, the 43 team leaders delivered 10-minute
summaries of their plans, quizzed foundation officials about details of the
grants and discussed possible ethical quandaries with bioethicists from the
University of Toronto.
(The most common questions were about the one ironclad rule: grantees may
patent anything they discover, but must make it available cheaply to poor
countries. An ethical concern common to many projects is that they will
eventually require clinical trials on impoverished Africans or Asians with
little understanding of informed consent.)
In the hallways and over cocktails and dinners - all paid for by the
foundation - virologists and neurologists talked with plant biologists and
nanoparticle physicists, sometimes finding ways to help one another. For
example, a scientist with plans to improve vitamin-fortified "golden rice"
asked the designer of a hand-held laboratory to test blood for pathogens
whether it could be modified to test blood for iron and vitamins.
Mr. Gates, in an interview, sidestepped a request to name his favorite
projects. "Oh, I love all my children," he said.
But he remained brutally realistic about where his "children" - and the money
he lavishes on them - were likely to end up. "Eighty percent of these are
likely to be dead ends," he said. "But even if we have a 10 percent hit rate,
it will all have been worthwhile."
What follows is a selection of the winning projects.
Dried Vaccines
The only scientist to emit a goose honk during his presentation was Robert E.
Sievers, who was illustrating inexpensive straws with useful vibrations.
Dr. Sievers, the chief executive of Aktiv-Dry, a Colorado company that turns
liquids into superfine powders, is trying to develop a measles vaccine that can
be stored dry and inhaled.
He proposed turning it into glassy particles around a matrix of trehalose,
the sugar that allows brine shrimp cysts to survive dried out for years but
hatch into wriggling creatures in seawater. (The shrimp are perhaps better
known as the "amazing live sea monkeys" advertised in comic books.)
For the powder to reach the lungs instead of sticking to the straw or the
throat, the particles must be dispersed evenly in the airstream. Vibration
helps, and he tested oboe reeds, New Year's noisemakers and goose calls, trying
to find something disposable that needs no power, even from batteries.
A longtime chemistry professor at the University of Colorado, Dr. Sievers,
70, had a second career running a company developing pollution-detection
instruments when his son, a pediatrician, described how premature newborns were
given surfactants to keep their lung sacs from sticking like Cling Wrap.
"They squirt a bolus of water down into the lungs, then they turn the baby
over and pour it out," the elder Dr. Sievers said, shaking his head in
disbelief. "There had to be a way to improve that."
In the 1990's, he turned his hand to inhalers for surfactants, then for
asthma and now for vaccines. "Measles kills 2,000 children a day," he said,
briefly tearing up, and then apologizing for it, as he described his new
passion for the cause and what his $20 million grant will let him pursue.
"That's like a World Trade Center disaster every day. This is what I want to do
with the last stretch of my life."
Abraham L. Sonenshein of Tufts University, who received $5 million, wants to
use bacterial spores, another form of nature that can survive desert heat or
Arctic cold.
"Our ideal vaccine would be a packet of spores that could be emptied into a
glass of juice and drunk down," he said
His chosen vehicle, bacillus subtilis, is found all over the world in dirt.
"Safety is a nonissue," he said. "A large fraction of the Japanese population
eats it every day for breakfast." The bacteria are used to ferment soybeans for
a dish called natto.
But rather than simply drying an existing vaccine, he wants to splice into
the subtilis bacterium's DNA the ability to make the fragments of viral protein
that provoke the immune reaction.
Dried bacterial spores could survive indefinitely - and then bloom in the gut
and start assembling the proteins.
He has already inserted the genes for diphtheria and tetanus vaccines, and is
working on adding whooping cough and rotavirus.
Ten years ago, he said, a Tufts colleague came back from a conference on
children's diseases and excitedly described how hard it was to keep vaccines
cold in villages without electricity.
Dr. Sonenshein, a bacteria expert, said he replied: "Why are you telling me
this?"
But as soon as his colleague asked whether spores could help
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