MicrobeWorld's Meet the Scientist Podcast

Stanley Plotkin is Professor Emeritus at the Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. A renowned vaccinologist, Dr. Plotkin is, perhaps, best known for developing a highly successful vaccine for rubella back in 1968. We are still using the same vaccine 40 years later. Dr. Plotkin has been honored with the inaugural Maurice Hilleman / Merck Award for his lifetime of dedication to vaccinology. For most people, rubella amounts to a bad rash and a crummy week, but for a fetu...

Melanie Cushion holds down two jobs: she’s a research career scientist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she’s also professor and associate chair for research in the department of internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Dr. Cushion focuses her research on the fungus, Pneumocystis carinii, which is a harmless commensal for most people, but a deadly pathogen for others. Pneumocystis carinii was shrouded in obscurity for many years until its fifteen minutes in the spotlight came in the 80’s, when, unfortunately, an outbreak of Pneumocystis pneumonia prefigured the AIDS epidemic. Large numbers of previously healthy homosexual men in California became deathly ill with Pneumocystis pneumonia, and doctors knew something unusual (later found to be HIV) was going on. Dr. Cushion says Pneumocystis pneumonia is an opportunistic infection: it strikes individuals with immune systems too weak to fend it off. This explains why it was – and...

Ian Orme is a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University, and his research focuses on the immune response to tuberculosis (TB) — a bacterial disease that most often infects the lungs. He’s speaking at the American Society for Microbiology’s upcoming meeting on Continuing Undergraduate Education (ASMCUE). In the U.S., TB seems like a thing of the past. Here, public health measures and medical care have all but wiped out the threat from this infection. But worldwide, the WHO says there were 9.2 million new TB cases in 2006 alone, and each person with TB infects an average of 10 to 15 people with the TB bacterium every year. These are just some of the reasons Dr. Orme is delivering a talked titled “Tuberculosis: Why Now Is a Good Time to Leave the Planet” at ASMCUE. He admits leaving the planet isn’t a practical suggestion, but he wants to raise awareness of the disease and he’s not afraid to stir the pot a little. Orme and his...

Parisa Ariya is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Chemistry Department at McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Ariya works mostly in atmospheric chemistry, but she has also done a good deal of work with bioaerosols and airborne microorganisms. She will deliver a talk at the ASM General Meeting in May titled Bioaerosols - Impact on Physics and Chemistry of the Atmosphere. Bioaerosols – microscopic clumps of microorganisms and organic debris – arise through any of a number of mechanisms. The scientific community has come full circle on the idea of microorganisms in the atmosphere, according to Dr. Ariya. Back in the early days of microbiology it was widely recognized that the air is full of living, breathing microbes, but once our understanding of atmospheric chemistry and physics matured, the roles of microbes in atmospheric processes were marginalized. Thanks, in part, to Dr. Ariya’s work, the activities and functions of bioaerosols are getting new attentio...

Jeff Bender is a professor of veterinary public health at the University of Minnesota, and his research interests lie in the intersection of animal health and human health, including animal-borne diseases of humans, food safety, and antibiotic resistant pathogens in animals. Dr. Bender will speak on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in Veterinary Practice at the American Society for Microbiology’s General Meeting in Philadelphia this May. To a microorganism, vertebrates can all look pretty similar. Dr. Bender’s work focuses on pathogens that can make themselves at home in both human bodies and the bodies of our pets and livestock. Outbreaks of bacterial illnesses from meat products are well publicized these days, but the pathogens we have in common with animals don’t just travel in one direction. We humans can pass organisms and diseases to our animals, too. Dr. Bender says pets treated at veterinary clinics, for example, have come down with painful MRSA skin infections they pi...

Jo Handelsman is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she’s a member of the Department of Plant Pathology and chair of the Department of Bacteriology. Dr. Handelsman’s research focuses on microbial communities – their composition, how they’re structured, and how they work. Thanks to her work to improve the quality of undergraduate education, Dr. Handelsman is this year’s recipient of the American Society for Microbiology’s Carski Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award. Dr. Handelsman has been at the cutting edge of microbial science for years. After a long time spent studying the teeming communities of microorganisms that dwell in soil, Handelsman has pared down her focus to some arguably simpler neighborhoods: the guts of insects. Handelsman applies molecular methods to identify the strains and genes present in bug guts and combines this knowledge with other information about these environments to learn what these communities might be doing. Handelsman also takes a particular...

David Knipe is the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical school. A virologist, Dr. Knipe focuses his research efforts on the herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) – the virus we have to thank for genital herpes. An astonishing 20% of Americans have been infected with HSV-2, and whether they’ve had a recognizable outbreak of sores or not, they can still carry the virus. Once you contract the HSV-2 it lays low in your nerve cells, waiting for the right moment to create watery blisters that eventually burst and release more virus particles. Dr. Knipe is interested in how the cells lead these two, very different lives: quiet and quiescent inside the nerve cell and loud and lytic in the epithelium on the surface of the body. Genital herpes is no picnic, but the effects of HSV-2 infection are worst in people with depressed immune systems and in newborns; babies who pick up the virus during birth may suffer from neurological damage, brain damage, or even death. There is no c...

Andrew Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History in Harvard University’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where he studies ancient life, its impacts on the environment, and how the environment, in turn, shaped the evolution of life. In recognition of the 200th anniversary of Charles’ Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the first printing of his book, “On the Origin of Species,” the American Society for Microbiology has invited Dr. Knoll to deliver the opening lecture, titled “Microbes and Earth History,” at the society’s general meeting in Philadelphia this year. Before the dinosaurs, before trees and leaves, before trilobites, there were microbes. Vast, slimy layers of them covered the rocks and peppered the seas of the harsh, alien planet we now call Earth. Those slimy cells were our ancestors, and they played a defining role in changing that once-barren moonscape into the world we see today: a planet covered with diverse, striving life, topped by an o...

Roberto Kolter is a professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kolter’s research interests are broad, but he says his eclectic program boils down to an interest in the ecology and evolution of microbes, bacteria in particular, and on how these forces operate at the molecular level. Although he’s worked in a number of different systems, lately Dr. Kolter is spending a lot of time with Bacillus subtilis, a modest little bacterium that doesn’t get the headlines of a wicked pathogen like Salmonella or a useful industrial workhorse like yeast. What it lacks in notoriety, B. subtilis makes up for in usefulness. According to Dr. Kolter, B. subtilis is an important source of industrial enzymes, as in laundry detergent, and, as a bacterial model, a prolific source of information on how some bacteria make spores and other diverse cell types. This ability to form different kinds of cells is intriguing to Dr. Kolter: B. subtilis cells can wear any of a number of diffe...

Dr. Ellen Jo Baron is a professor of pathology and director of clinical microbiology at Stanford University’s medical center in Palo Alto, California. A co-author of the authoritative Manual of Clinical Microbiology, Dr. Baron and her staff in the clinical lab evaluate and advise in the development of new diagnostic technologies. Dr. Baron has also volunteered her time as a microbiology advisor in numerous hospitals and clinics in developing countries since 1996. In a hospital, you have to be able to diagnose infections in order to treat patients, but hospitals in the developing world that are forced to get along with inadequate and ill-equipped microbiology labs have to treat infectious disease blindly, without full knowledge of which organism is to blame and which drugs will be most effective. These missteps cost lives. Dr. Baron, who normally works in a modern, fully-equipped western hospital, travels to hospitals and clinics in places like Cambodia and Nepal to train staff and organize clinica...