key often found in the lush forests of

LETTER FROM CAMEROON the region.

“Those monkeys are viral ware-
houses,” Wolfe said to me, as the cou-
THE DOOMSDAY STRAIN ple drove toward the market, drag-
ging their bloody merchandise behind
Can Nathan Wolfe thwart the next AIDS before it spreads? them. Mangabeys carry many viruses
that infect humans, including one that
BY MICHAEL SPECTER may cause a rare form of T-cell leuke-
mia and another, simian foamy virus,
“
L ook up,’’ Nathan Wolfe barked.
I didn’t respond immediately, so
the next suggestion came with an el-
established in the past decade to mon-
itor the emergence of deadly viruses
from the jungles of Central Africa. He
the ultimate impact of which is not yet
known. Wolfe is a forty-year-old biol-
ogist from Stanford University; a swar-
bow to the ribs: “Take your head out of nodded toward a couple who had just thy man with a studiously dishevelled
that map.” We were standing on the pulled up beside us on a Chinese mo- look, he comes off as a cross between a
side of “the road,” a dirt highway that torcycle. The driver wore flip-flops and pirate and a graduate student. He is
passes through the center of Min- a red tracksuit. His passenger, dressed also the world’s most prominent virus
dourou, a dusty logging village in in a pale-blue shirt and a matching pill- hunter, and he spends much of his time
southeastern Cameroon. Wolfe, the box hat, looked as if she were on her sifting through the blood of wild ani-
director of Global Viral Forecasting, way to church. But that wasn’t where mals. “When I see a monkey like that
and several colleagues were in the they were headed. Her right arm was dragged through the street, bloody, on
midst of a ten-hour drive from the cap- wrapped around the driver’s waist. In the way to market, it’s like looking at a
ital, Yaoundé, to a town called Ngoila, her left, she clutched the lengthy tail of loaded weapon,’’ he said. “It scares me.”
one of the many sites that G.V.F. has a freshly killed agile mangabey, a mon- For much of the ride from Yaoundé,

Wolfe’s world consists of “bacteria, parasites, and viruses”; animals are “a tiny little addendum.” Photograph by Martin Schoeller.
50 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010
Wolfe had been expounding upon the Genetically, we are not an especially help much. If H1N1 had been more
health dangers posed by bushmeat, the diverse species; an epidemic that can virulent, it would have killed millions
common term for tropical wild game, kill people in one part of the world can of people. Maybe tens of millions.
which includes monkeys, gorillas, kill them in any other. “There is simply Once it got out there, that thing burned
chimpanzees, porcupines, scaly anteat- no greater threat to humanity than a right through the forest. We caught an
ers, cane rats, and other animals. Hu- viral pandemic,” Wolfe told me. “What amazingly lucky break, but let’s not
mans have subsisted on bushmeat for is more likely to kill millions of peo- kid ourselves. Luck like that doesn’t
millennia, and in this part of Africa it ple? Nuclear war or a virus that makes last.”
remains a principal source of protein— the leap from animal to man? If, tomor- Wolfe continued his soliloquy for
sometimes the only source. Central row, I had to go to Las Vegas and place much of the trip into the jungle—even
Africans consume at least two million a bet on the next great killer, I would after an unfortunate pit stop notable for
tons a year. It is not easy to convince put all my money on a virus.” The No- a painful run-in with a column of red
somebody whose only alternative is bel Prize-winning molecular biologist ants. To reach Ngoila, we had to cross
hunger and malnutrition that eating Joshua Lederberg once expressed a the Dja River the only way possible: by
monkeys or apes can be more of a similar sentiment, writing that viruses ferryboat. Instead of an engine, how-
threat to him than it was to his an- were “the single biggest threat to man’s ever, the pilot relied on an elaborate
cestors. Yet the health risks are enor- continued dominance on this planet.” pulley system and on the willingness of
mous—not just for the Africans who For most experts, the question isn’t passengers to haul on the rope them-
kill and eat them but for billions of whether another deadly virus will ap- selves. The crossing may well have
others throughout the world. If not for pear, either naturally or from a lab in been the highlight of Wolfe’s week:
the consumption of bushmeat, AIDS, the form of a biological weapon, but he joined the tow line and guilted me
which has so far killed thirty million when. “We cannot afford to let another into pulling, too. We made it to Ngoila
people and infected more than twice epidemic like AIDS get out of control,” as darkness fell.
that number, would never have spread Wolfe said. “Why are we sitting around After a restorative meal, Wolfe said
so insidiously across the planet. That passively waiting until new diseases in- it was time to look for bats, noting that
pandemic, the most lethal of modern fect half the globe?” they were among the most dangerous
times, began nearly a century ago, in Wolfe compares the current ap- viral reservoirs on earth. At that, he and
Cameroon, when a chimpanzee virus proach to infectious epidemics to the I marched into the pitch-black forest,
was transmitted to the blood of some- treatment of cardiovascular disease in accompanied by several members of his
one who almost certainly hunted, the nineteen-sixties. At the time, doc- team and the thunderous honking of
butchered, or ate it. tors could do little more than wait un- Epomops bats.
Deadly viruses have always threat- til heart-attack or stroke victims were
ened humanity, but a virus can travel
only as far as the cells it infects. For most
of human history, that wasn’t very far. A
rushed to the hospital, and then do
their best to keep them alive. As our
knowledge of factors like diet, smok-
M ost virologists spend their work-
ing lives in laboratories, looking
at slides, focussing on specific proteins
few hundred years ago, if H.I.V. had ing, and blood pressure deepened, the and, often, on a single disease. Nathan
passed from an ape to a hunter, that per- emphasis shifted largely from treating Wolfe’s life conforms more to the pat-
son would have become sick and died. heart disease to preventing it. “When tern of a nineteenth-century explorer
He might even have infected his entire you know what the risks are, then your than to that of a twenty-first-century bi-
village, killing everyone around him. But job is to lower them,’’ Wolfe said. “And ologist. Instead of big game, however,
that would have been the end of it. There with viral epidemics we are begin- Wolfe’s trophies are viruses. A fastidi-
were no motorcycles to carry the infected ning to know what the risks are. Yet, ous man who shaves his beard to a rough
carcasses of slaughtered apes to markets by the time we mobilize, it is invari- stubble every few days (and does the
in Yaoundé, and, for that matter, no air- ably too late. Look at H1N1”—the same thing to his head every few weeks),
planes to ship them to Paris or New 2009 influenza pandemic that infected Wolfe has an office in San Francisco,
York. Forests had been impenetrable for as many as ninety million people in the where Global Viral Forecasting is
thousands of years. In the past few de- United States alone and hundreds of based, and another at Stanford, where
cades, however, new roads, built largely millions throughout the world. “Since he is the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Pro-
by logging companies, have brought the strain turned out to be unusually fessor in Human Biology. He spends
economic opportunity to millions of mild, people said we made too much at least half his time in California but
Africans, along with better medicine, of a fuss. There was the sentiment— doesn’t seem entirely at home there—
clean water, and improved access to ed- I have heard it expressed numerous unless the conversation turns to infec-
ucation. Yet, seen from the perspective times—that the public health service tious diseases. Then Wolfe is all in. He
of a virus, those roads, combined with overreacted by trying to vaccinate as can talk for hours about hemorrhagic
air travel, have created another kind of many people as possible. That’s wrong. fevers, river blindness, the Barmah For-
opportunity, transforming humanity Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.” Wolfe’s est virus, and malaria—which, he will
into one long chain of easily infected voice rose half an octave with each be happy to tell you, once nearly killed
hosts—no less vulnerable in California word. “They did exactly what they him. Wolfe finds the idea of the vi-
than in Cameroon. should have done, and even that didn’t rome—the collective genetic structure
52 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010
 well as from the animals that they kill,
butcher, and eat. The scientists screen
the samples to determine whether any
humans have been infected with viruses
that came from animals. Virologists
refer to the activity of viruses as they
leap from animal to man as “viral chat-
ter.” Wolfe and his colleagues monitor
samples for early warnings of an epi-
demic, just as, he often says, analysts “at
the National Security Agency scour the
Internet, listening for clues of impend-
ing terrorist attacks.”
When Wolfe is in the field, he func-
tions more as an anthropologist than
as a biologist. The institute tries to keep
track of hunters in scores of villages
throughout Cameroon, the Democratic
Republic of Congo, Gabon, and other
countries. Outreach teams offer health-
education classes and collect blood and
“His Highness is changing his relationship status.” tissue samples. This program, called
Healthy Hunters, is pure social work. It
• • isn’t easy for a foreigner (or anyone else)
to tell rural Africans how to conduct
their lives. Customs vary widely. “On
of every virus on earth—so captivating on by a disabling hemorrhagic virus first one of my first visits to a village site
that he once described the world to me discovered in Nigeria two years after in Cameroon, I was with my ex-wife,’’
as a place that consists almost entirely Stewart’s testimony, as well as those Wolfe recalled recently. “When we ar-
of “bacteria, parasites, and viruses,” add- caused by the Nipah, Hendra, and rived, the chief looked at her and asked
ing that “animals really have to be seen Marburg viruses, which are less fre- me, ‘Ça c’est pour moi?’ It took a second
as a tiny little addendum.” The un- quently mentioned yet just as frighten- for me to get what he was asking.’’
dergraduate seminar he teaches at Stan- ing. These illnesses are called zoono- The team tries to put local scien-
ford each spring, on the ecological sig- ses—diseases that pass to humans from tists out front and never to arrive in a
nificance of microorganisms, is called animals. village empty-handed. Before we left
Viral Lifestyles. Wolfe is determined to break this Yaoundé, Wolfe helped load a dozen
A few decades ago, Wolfe’s micro- pattern of disease transmission, which soccer balls into the back of a Land
bial obsession would have been con- began ten thousand years ago, with the Cruiser. It is virtually impossible to
sidered eccentric. The victory over rise of agricultural communities and drive by a field in Cameroon without
communicable diseases seemed as- domesticated livestock. In 2008, with seeing a group of boys kicking some-
sured. In 1967, William H. Stewart, funding from Google.org, the Skoll thing around—fruit, rolled-up wads of
the Surgeon General, told a gathering Foundation, the Department of De- cotton, sometimes an actual ball.
of health experts at the White House, fense, the National Institutes of Health, Everywhere Wolfe and his col-
“It is time to close the books on infec- and others, he founded Global Viral leagues go, they stress, in graphic de-
tious diseases.” That statement was Forecasting, with a goal that was both tail, the critical point that primates are
not wholly without justification. In remarkably simple and stunningly am- not for eating. They long ago learned
the West, at least, polio, typhoid, chol- bitious: to detect pandemics as they not to push or proselytize. Hard sells
era, even measles—all major killers— begin and stop them before they spread. backfire—and usually aren’t necessary.
had essentially been vanquished. Small- Wolfe and his rapidly expanding In Central Africa, where people live in
pox, which was responsible for the team of researchers have created an ex- wattle huts and dine on bushmeat,
deaths of more people than have died tensive network of viral listening posts viruses like Ebola and H.I.V. are not
in any single war, soon disappeared. in the villages of Central Africa, and vague or distant horrors. They are pres-
Since then, however, at least fifty they have compiled a registry of viruses ent always, like an endless war, killing
dangerous new viruses have passed from in many other places where pandemics neighbors and destroying lives.
animals into humans. Some are so well often start: China, Malaysia, Madagas- The institute’s research has yielded
known that their names are enough to car, and Laos. In the past decade, the disturbing results. In October, a group
make people anxious: Ebola, SARS, group has collected more than a hun- that included Wolfe published a re-
avian influenza. There are dozens of dred and fifty thousand blood samples port demonstrating that human parvo-
other diseases, like Lassa fever, brought from hunters and their families, as virus 4, which was thought to spread
54 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010
solely through shared needles, is far tle we know,” Wolfe said. “Where do you would have to search your entire
more prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa the major diseases come from? How life to find a new primate. That early
than had previously been believed. does a particular virus make the transi- moment of discovery is where we are
Needles and blood transfusions couldn’t tion into a human host? Is it influ- now with viruses. . . . I don’t want to
possibly account for all the cases. More enced by certain types of behavior or oversell it. But in theory, at least, the
ominously, working with researchers certain parts of the world? Why are recipe is simple. You plug the danger-
from Cameroon and the Centers for some viruses so much more deadly ous viruses into some sort of vaccine
Disease Control, in Atlanta, Wolfe than others? We have no answers for pipeline. Get all the vaccine parts lined
discovered that the simian foamy virus, many of those questions.” Even if sci- up, put them together, and get them to
which is endemic in Old World pri- entists succeed in identifying new vi- the people.”
mates, infects one per cent of those ruses before they escape into the wider Wolfe’s optimism is easy to em-
who come into regular contact with go- population, pandemics won’t disap- brace. Nonetheless, the barriers to
rillas and other monkeys. That amounts pear. “We know a lot about heart dis- achieving control over our biological
to thousands of people walking around ease,’’ Wolfe said. “But it still kills surroundings are daunting. “I won’t
Cameroon with a retroviral infection thousands of people every day.” say viruses can be conquered,’’ David
that may or may not lead to illness. Be- Like snakes, viruses have a reputa- Baltimore told me. Baltimore, the for-
fore the study was published, the virus, tion as malevolent, poisonous, and mer president of Caltech, received a
which earned its evocative name be- deadly. In fact, most snakes are harm- Nobel Prize for his work in elucidat-
cause cells infected by it look foamy less, and dangerous viruses are rare. In ing the mechanics of retroviruses. “Not
under a microscope, had never been order to inflict serious harm, a virus completely. But they don’t have to
known to pass between wild animals has to clear several biological hurdles. conquer us, either.”
and hunters. None of the people in- First, it has to remain unrecognized by
fected with S.F.V. have shown signs of
sickness. Yet, as H.I.V. has demon-
strated, it can take years for a retrovirus
the human immune system—to evade
any protective antibodies. The virus
would also need to make humans sick.
T he morning after we arrived in
Ngoila, Matthew LeBreton, the
ecology director of Global Virus Fore-
to cause symptoms of a disease. (Most do not.) Finally, it would have casting, stood in a laboratory in the
Wolfe hopes to create a database to spread efficiently—for example, back of the group’s spare but well-
containing genetic information from through coughing, sneezing, or shak- equipped outpost. He slipped on a
those viruses, a resource that biologi- ing hands. Many viruses fulfill one of surgical smock, a pair of latex gloves, a
cal engineers could use to assemble these criteria; some fulfill two; far face mask, and safety glasses. Then he
effective vaccines from standard molec- fewer meet all three. “Look at H.I.V.,’’ picked up a live fruit bat and dangled it
ular parts. Building such vaccines, Wolfe said. “We would have to call at arm’s length. There are three dozen
while a long way off, is a fundamental that the biggest near-miss of our life- species of bats in southeastern Camer-
goal of synthetic biology. American time. Can you imagine how many peo- oon. LeBreton can identify all of them.
bioterrorism experts have shown par- ple would already have died if H.I.V. Bats are well known for transmitting
ticular enthusiasm, though: any pro- could be transmitted by a cough?” rabies, but they carry other debilitating
cess that might protect humanity from Viruses mutate rapidly, particularly microbes as well; fruit bats, for exam-
natural viruses could also be deployed in comparison with the glacial pace ple, are believed to be the principal
against viruses made by man. of human evolution. What source of the Ebola virus. “The more
(This is just one reason that seems benign one day can be- you know about bats the more you are
the Department of Defense come deadly the next. Cold going to know about viruses,’’ Le-
and other federal agencies viruses are usually considered Breton told me as he laid the choco-
have been highly supportive little more than nuisances, but late-brown specimen on a digital scale.
of Wolfe’s research.) “The SARS, a virus from the same “We try to process them carefully and
more we learn about how family as many colds, is lethal. often.”
these viruses are transmitted So is avian influenza. “When LeBreton took urine and fecal sam-
to humans, the more likely it comes to predicting what a ples from the bat. He worked delib-
we will be able to stop them,’’ virus will do, we don’t even erately, but with speed, spreading the
Anthony S. Fauci, the direc- know what it is we need to bat’s wings and pricking them to ob-
tor of the National Institute of Allergy learn,” Wolfe said. “We are really just tain a blood sample, which he depos-
and Infectious Diseases, said. “It is al- at the beginning.” ited in a vat of liquid nitrogen. He then
ways better to prevent a disease than to He continued, “There was a mo- turned to me and said, “Now we set the
treat it.” ment in the nineteenth century before bat free.’’
Detecting viral pandemics before we had charted all the mammals in the Later that morning, we drove to
they spread will be hard; responding world, and we found so many new spe- Mbalam to watch Joseph Diffo, who
to them before they spread will be cies that people would say, ‘Oh, gosh, was born in a similar Cameroonian vil-
harder still. “When it comes to under- we will never document the diversity of lage, discuss the dangers of bushmeat
standing the origins of human dis- animal life on this planet.’ And with with local hunters and their families.
eases, you would be surprised how lit- mammals that now seems silly, because Diffo has a master’s degree in zoology
56 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010
and has worked with G.V.F. as a wild-
life technician since 2004. He serves
as the site coördinator for field sam- THE BLUE HAMMOCK
pling and hunter-education programs.
The hunters had gathered early, set- Behind the toolshed, among the nettles,
tling into couches and armchairs that and rusting horseshoes, I buried the key.
they had dragged to the village square.
Diffo, a husky man in blue work pants The white dog watched me, whimpering,
and a red checkered shirt, passed around as if he disapproved of what I was doing
a sheaf of photographs. The group sud-
denly became quiet. but when I unearthed a bone and threw it
“Do you see that boy?” Diffo asked, he bounded away, barking, into the field.
pointing to a recent picture of a local
child whose face and body were covered I replaced the spade in the shed, strode off
with the type of blistering lesions that to the blue hammock, and climbed into it.
for centuries were the hallmark of
smallpox. “Why do you think he looks Swaying from side to side, I began to hum
like that?” Nobody answered—but any the tune from the first spaghetti Western,
of them could have. “His father found
dead monkeys lying in the forest,’’ Diffo where Clint raises his poncho and shoots,
continued, speaking in French. “He then lights up another cigarillo. Above me
brought them home to feed his family.’’
At least one of those animals had been the silver birch with my initials stretched
infected with monkeypox, which, while upward to its far-off father, the moon.
milder and less contagious than small-
pox, can be deadly. “If you see a group They would never, ever find that key, and
of animals lying in the forest, do not in the morning I would head for Lisbon,
pick them up,’’ Diffo said. “Whatever
killed them can kill you.” It is a message where I’d rent a room in hilly Alfama,
that Diffo repeats constantly as he then translate the entire work of Brecht.
passes through the villages of Central
Africa. He comes armed with gruesome The seagulls are huge there, and musical.
pictures of dead primates, posters ex- The crows spend most time on the ground.
plaining the health dangers posed by
hunting bushmeat, and bars of soap for —Matthew Sweeney
people to use after killing or butchering
their prey.
The audience was receptive; the re- nian operations are based. “I spent spit the juice onto their paws and mas-
pulsive pictures seemed to have an im- years thinking about nonhuman pri- sage it into their fur; researchers sus-
pact. Everyone collected a large bar of mates, and there came a moment, in pect it acts as an antibacterial agent.
soap, and none of the questions the college, when I realized that, no mat- Birds also use plants as drugs, and they
hunters asked were hostile, exactly. ter how often we claim otherwise, hu- even appear to treat themselves with
“What can you get us to replace this mans are not the center of the world. ants, in a procedure known as “anting,”
meat?’’ one of them asked. Killing pri- We are players in a much bigger and rubbing them vigorously through their
mates may be dangerous for society more compelling drama. A lot of my plumage, until the ants secrete pro-
and ecologically ruinous, but his chil- work is just an attempt to figure out tective chemicals. (Wolfe’s interest
dren still needed to eat. “We don’t have what that drama looks like and where, in self-medicating behavior is not
anything else to give them,’’ he said. exactly, we do fit in.” wholly dispassionate. About a year
Diffo cast a worried glance at Wolfe, In the early nineteen-nineties, ago, he switched from cigarettes to the
who was watching from the side. “We while studying as an undergraduate Ploom—a high-tech nicotine-delivery
know that,’’ Wolfe said. “And we’re at Stanford, Wolfe became interested system. To “ploom,” one drops an alu-
working on it. But there is no easy in the self-medicating behavior of an- minum pod of tobacco into the cham-
way out.” imals, and the fact that, as he later ber of a Plexiglas cigarette holder that
wrote, “not all pharmacists are hu- looks like it was designed for George

N athan Wolfe’s first obsession was

with chimpanzees. “I always
loved them,’’ he told me one evening,
man.’’ Many species use plants as
medicine in much the same way that
we do. Kodiak bears routinely chew
Jetson. The Ploom delivers a mea-
sured, vaporized dose of nicotine,
without tar or other cancer-causing
while we sat on the veranda of our the root of Ligusticum, an herb more chemicals. Wolfe loves to light up in
hotel in Yaoundé, where his Cameroo- commonly known as bear root. They restaurants and theatres, and since no
58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010
smoke escapes, nobody notices. “It’s a fights got pretty intense.” Divorce may studies of H.I.V. prevalence among
total win-win for me,’’ he said, between have been inevitable—but it took a military recruits were the first to pro-
puffs on the strange device, which was while. First, she received a grant to vide a meaningful snapshot of the epi-
invented by friends of his from Stan- study in Thailand, and Wolfe fol- demic in the United States. The Pen-
ford. “Direct delivery of nicotine lowed her, moving from Harvard to tagon wanted an AIDS vaccine urgently,
without the risk of death.’’) Borneo. and Burke was asked to direct the
Wolfe spent his junior year in the Wolfe’s job there was to rescue effort. He started by exploring genetic
zoology department at Oxford, where orangutans that had become stranded variations within the virus itself. As
he steeped himself in the theories of a in isolated parts of the forest where with many infectious agents, including
longtime hero, Richard Dawkins, as they could no longer survive. He would polio and influenza, H.I.V. comes in
well as in the work of other evolution- shoot the animals with tranquillizer several strains. A vaccine that will work
ary biologists. After graduating, Wolfe darts, then move them to a reserve for one will not necessarily work for
began doctoral studies at Harvard, where they would be safe. Wolfe was all. Distinct regional variations are
under the guidance of the British pri- also able to do research for his doctoral common: a single strain, for example,
matologist Richard Wrangham and dissertation, on pathogens found in has been predominant in Europe and
the noted neuroscientist Marc Hauser. orangutan blood. “If you are trying to the United States, another in South
Wolfe intended to continue his ex- figure out what out there can infect us, Africa, and still another in Southeast
ploration of the primate medicinal ar- then looking at apes makes a lot of Asia.
mamentarium, but Wrangham wasn’t sense,” he said. “They have virtually the As Burke studied the data, how-
encouraging. “He said that learning same physiology as humans—but live ever, he saw something remarkable.
how chimpanzees medicate them- in these incredibly diverse terrestrial There was one place where every strain
selves would make a perfectly interest- ecosystems. And they are up to their of H.I.V. could be found: Central Af-
ing thesis,’’ Wolfe recalled, “but to have eyeballs in the blood of different types rica. “If you looked at Cameroon and
an impact you are going to have to of animals.” Gabon, you would see the roots of the
understand the underlying infectious One day, he received a message epidemic,’’ Burke said. “But nobody
diseases.’’ Wrangham told Wolfe that from his mother saying that an Army had any idea why.” Burke, who is now
he needed to become an expert in vi- officer named Donald Burke was look- the dean of the school of public health
ruses and parasites. ing for him. Burke, the chief virologist at the University of Pittsburgh, de-
Soon, Wolfe says, “I got completely at the Walter Reed Army Institute of cided to investigate further.
hooked on viruses. It is an area of ec- Research, in Silver Spring, had met Virologists and medical anthropol-
static ecological complexity.” While in Wolfe at a public-health conference ogists had long known that chimpan-
graduate school, Wolfe spent several the year before, and the men had spent zees and other apes carry viruses similar
summers in Uganda, where each hours talking about their shared obses- to those which infect humans. That’s
morning he foraged for dead mosqui- sion with viruses. Burke’s job, loosely hardly surprising, since those animals
toes among the feces in gorilla and defined, was to keep the United States are our nearest evolutionary relatives.
chimpanzee nests. “Not so glamorous,’’ Army safe from epidemics. For practi- Still, nobody had made an explicit con-
he said, shrugging. “But I was trying cal reasons, the military has always nection between the diseases of non-
to find viruses in their blood. The idea made the control of tropical diseases a human primates and AIDS. “I certainly
was to get mosquitoes after they had priority. Malaria, for example, has had never heard the word ‘bushmeat’
had a blood meal. I think I got about often caused more sickness and death before I went to Cameroon,’’ Burke
five.” among soldiers than bullets or bombs told me. “Let alone the possibility that
At the time, Wolfe was married to have. In 1943, in the midst of the bushmeat was associated with the
a social anthropologist he had met at Pacific campaign, General Douglas emergence of viruses.”
Harvard. They argued energetically, MacArthur complained, “This will be Burke made his first trip in 1996, at
but not in the way other people argue. a long war if for every division I have the invitation of Colonel Eitel Mpoudi-
“I was completely enamored with the facing the enemy I must count on a Ngole, a warm, garrulous man who ran
idea that the best way to look at human second division in hospital with ma- the country’s AIDS program, and who
behavior was to look at the behavior of laria and a third division convalescing was commonly referred to as Colonel
animals,” Wolfe said. “I believed in from this debilitating disease!” SIDA—the French acronym for AIDS.
evolutionary psychology. She was a In the nineteen-eighties, Burke’s “You did not have to spend much time
complete postmodernist.’’ He forced watching people hunting chimps to un-
the last two words out of his mouth as derstand that this was very clearly a pos-
if they were razor blades. “We had sible route of exposure,” Burke said.
fundamentally different views of the “There was blood everywhere, and no
nature of human behavior. I would al- precautions taken by the hunters or
ways say, ‘At the end of the day, we are their wives.”
just animals with some nice frosting Burke and Mpoudi-Ngole selected
on top.’ This drove her crazy. She was fifteen linguistically and geographi-
interested in how unique we are. The cally diverse villages in locations across
60 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010
Cameroon where they could test the
blood of people who came in close con-
tact with animals, particularly pri-
mates. It may now seem like an obvi-
ous undertaking, but essential ideas are
often obvious only in retrospect. When
I met Mpoudi-Ngole in Yaoundé, he
told me that, by drawing attention to
that link, Burke had done more to im-
prove the health of Africans than had
any other person alive.
Burke asked Wolfe to run the op-
eration. Wolfe agreed, but told Burke
that he wouldn’t be free for at least
a year. Burke said he would wait.
“That may have been my best scientific
decision,’’ he told me, only partly in
jest.
Wolfe lived in Yaoundé for five
years, beginning in 2000, and says he
loved every minute of it. He clearly
feels at home there. Social skills are as
important as scientific prowess to some-
one who spends so much of his life
moving from one research outpost to
the next, and Wolfe has a knack for
management. He has been able to re-
cruit prominent scientists who are de-
voted to him. “Nathan inspires me and
he inspires everyone we work with,’’
Joseph Fair, the organization’s chief
science officer, told me when I met
with him in Yaoundé. Like others on
Wolfe’s team, Fair left a lucrative job
to join the effort—and has never re-
gretted his decision. “We work fifteen-
hour days and on Saturdays and Sun-
days, and you do not get people to do
that if they are not enthusiastic,’’ he
said. “Nathan makes people feel very
good about what they do. Nobody
leaves.” (In 2008, Wolfe made a simi-
lar choice, walking away from a tenured
position in epidemiology at U.C.L.A.
to become a full-time virus hunter.
“Try explaining that one to your Jew-
ish mother,” he said.)
We had come to Yaoundé to attend
a meeting of military leaders and
health officials from several Central
African countries. The subject was
pandemic preparedness. Wolfe, Fair,
and the rest of the team were out every
night, listening to West African music
and eating tilapia, fufu, and cassava
with friends and any number of Army
generals. Wolfe was clearly the event’s
main attraction, and he was treated
with deference by military officials
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010 61
from Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, the specimens they obtain. “You do not in the incidence of monkeypox in
Gabon, and Congo—people who wait for perfection,’’ LeBreton told me. Congo since the early nineteen-eighties.
rarely agree on anything. “When . . . we work with bats, we can At first glance, the results were inexpli-
get specimens into liquid nitrogen in cable. Then a pattern emerged: Vac-
“
H ey, let’s go look at some blood,”
Wolfe called, summoning me
to what has to be the coldest labora-
the field. You can’t get better speci-
mens. They are frozen instantly. But it
is critical for our work that we not wait
cinia, the vaccine used so successfully
to eradicate smallpox, also protects
against monkeypox. After the last
tory in West Africa. The institute—a for something to be perfect. Because it’s known case of smallpox occurred, in So-
series of fortified bungalows—sits in never perfect.’’ malia, in 1977, however, the virus was
the middle of a secure camp on the The blood samples have already pro- considered officially eradicated. In most
grounds of the Cameroonian Mili- vided enough data for scores of scientific countries, the vaccinations soon
tary Health Research Center, in central publications. Last year, scientists relied stopped, and when they did, a critical
Yaoundé. It doesn’t feel particularly on the G.V.F. registry to identify the line of defense against monkeypox was
military, though—or, for that matter, source of Plasmodium falciparum, the lost. “The eradication of smallpox is one
secure. Just a few hundred yards away, form of malaria that has probably killed of the triumphs of medical history,’’
scores of merchants—who seem to have more people than any other living or- Wolfe said. “But nothing in biology is
cornered the global market on extension ganism. The origins and the evolution- simple.”
cords, plug adapters, and USB char- ary history of the parasite have always Wolfe sat atop a freezer and dangled
gers—sell their wares along the wide been murky. Because malaria is so wide- his legs like a schoolboy. The monkey-
avenues of the capital. spread among humans, and so deadly, pox finding was particularly gratifying
The health-research complex has its for years the most common scientific to him because it demonstrated the un-
own water supply, a liquid-nitrogen theory held that humans passed the dis- foreseen complexities of biological sys-
plant, and a series of freezers set at ease to other primates. To test the hy- tems. “There is a thought experiment
minus eighty degrees Celsius—an ideal pothesis, Wolfe, Stephen Rich, of the that I like,’’ Wolfe said. (“Thought ex-
temperature for preserving tissue speci- University of Massachusetts, and others periment” is a phrase he uses often.)
mens. Wolfe stood in the middle of a examined the genetic structure of a hun- “Let’s just say you had a light switch on
row of cylinders, each filled with cryo- dred samples of the chimpanzee version the wall and you could flip that switch
genically preserved samples of blood of the malaria parasite—P. reichenowi. and destroy every virus on the planet.
and tissue, taken from hunters, bats, They identified eight strains that collec- Would you flip that switch? Almost ev-
cane rats, gorillas, spot-nosed monkeys, tively were far more genetically diverse eryone would say yes. But the effect on
chimpanzees, and scaly anteaters. than the human form. In fact, P. falci- the planet would be so profound that
Looking Californian in a maroon parum could, in most cases, be con- life as we know it would cease to exist.”
sport shirt and sneakers, he quickly un- structed from the genes of the chimp Wolfe may be the viral world’s most
screwed one of the cylinders. A gust of virus. That could only mean that the vigorous apologist, but he isn’t wrong.
nitrogen vapor swirled out. The speci- human form came from chimps, not the Viruses can kill, yet they are also essen-
mens in these containers make up per- other way around. tial. In fact, vaccinia, which defeated
haps the most comprehensive library of Wolfe’s team has also used its blood smallpox, is itself a virus closely related
human and animal blood work in Af- samples to search for variants of a virus to cowpox. In some parts of Japan, there
rica. Hunters throughout the country called H.T.L.V.—human T-lympho- have long been high rates of infection
now routinely carry filter paper, and tropic virus—which infects millions of with H.T.L.V.-1, which can cause leu-
when they kill a wild animal the hunt- people and causes leukemia and neuro- kemia. People who are infected with
ers deposit a few drops of blood on the logical illnesses. There had been two that virus, however, are far less likely to
paper and seal it in a baggie (provided known strains—H.T.L.V.-1 and develop stomach cancer than those who
by G.V.F.). They can send the sample H.T.L.V.-2—and researchers found are not. In a study that followed a thou-
to the lab or wait until somebody comes evidence of both viruses in the primate sand people, participants were two and
to collect it. The idea arose from a blood samples; they also discovered a half times as likely to develop stomach
method used by Matthew LeBreton to two new viruses, which they named cancer if they were free of H.T.L.V.-1
preserve dead snakes. “Everybody kills H.T.L.V.-3 and H.T.L.V.-4. “This is than if they were infected.
snakes. It is almost a reflex for humans,’’ an astonishing array of viruses,’’ Don- Bacteria, the dominant life form on
LeBreton told me. For years, he trav- ald Burke told me. “We have no idea earth, are often controlled by viruses.
elled the length of the country, compil- how easily those viruses adapt to hu- They help regulate marine photosyn-
ing what would become the definitive mans. Or how easily they can be trans- thesis, and without them there would
book on the reptiles of Cameroon. “I mitted between humans. But we better likely be no algae and no fish in the sea.
would go to villages and ask people to get prepared. Because, frankly, what we In fact, earlier this year a team of re-
just throw them in a pot of formalin, already know should be enough to searchers from M.I.T. managed to pro-
which preserved the snakes until I could frighten us all.” gram viruses to mimic the process by
collect and catalogue them.’’ This year, Wolfe joined with a team which plants use sunlight to manufac-
Neither LeBreton nor Wolfe be- of African, French, and American re- ture the chemicals they need to live.
lieves that it pays to be too picky about searchers to report a twentyfold increase “The reason we think of viruses as neg-
62 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010
ative entities is that physicians are the
drunks looking under the lamppost for
their keys,” Wolfe has written. “If you
are just looking for negative viruses, that
is all you are going to find.”

O n a good day, a hunter in Messok-

Messok, a dense jungle settle-
ment not far from Ngoila, straggles
home with an antelope slung over his
shoulder. Or a cane rat. Monkeys,
chimps, and gorillas are disappearing,
so they are increasingly hard to find.
But every so often somebody gets lucky.
Late one afternoon, a village man
walked into town carrying the body of
a crowned monkey, which he turned
over to his wife, a pregnant twenty-
two-year-old named Sandrine. She laid
the crowned monkey, so called for the “Don’t be silly—mathematically, there will always be a middle class.”
soft tuft of white hair spread across its
skull, on a mat of bright-green palm
fronds that she had placed on the floor
• •
of the hut. Then she grabbed her ma-
chete. With practiced speed and im- issue. With support from U.S.A.I.D., team wants every hunter to have a
pressive precision, Sandrine slit the she is attempting to determine the phone. If somebody is feeling sick, or
monkey’s gut, reached in, and pulled best way to change the behaviors that finds five dead gorillas in the forest,
out its intestines. The ground was soon cause so much risk.) He pointed to or if a doctor sees an unusual rash, a
drenched with blood, and so were her Sandrine, who stood examining her text message can get that information
hands. Wolfe, LeBreton, and I stood work in the soft afternoon light. “She out at once. Viral listening posts won’t
ten feet away, with several members of knows that this is risky,” he said. “But work unless villagers are able to share
their team, who were wearing gloves it is not as risky for her as all the other their knowledge. “If Twitter can pre-
and waiting to collect tissue and blood choices in her life. We can worry all dict movie sales or stock-market move-
samples. As the young woman quar- we want about viral pandemics, but ments, and Google searches can show
tered the animal and sliced off its tail, that is not what keeps her up at night. us where the next flu outbreak will be,
the scientists pulled their face masks She needs to care about dinner. And, surely we can find tools to help this
tight. I asked Wolfe if he ever offered until we recognize that, the rest means woman,’’ Wolfe said. “If we connect
such precautions to the villagers, and nothing.” these people more carefully to the
whether it bothered him to see this There are no cell-phone towers in larger world, we could begin to address
woman risk her life. this part of Cameroon. No money. many of these problems.”
“Of course it bothers me,’’ he said. The best roads are mud paths cut by Sandrine had just finished preparing
“But here are the choices: We can do logging companies to move massive the meat for dinner. I asked her if she
nothing. We can try to blend in and and ancient trees, some of which are so understood how risky it was to plunge
work without masks or gloves. I won’t large that specially constructed trucks her hands into the intestines of a dead
allow my people to take those risks. are required to cart them out of the monkey. “Yes,” she said. “I know that
If you are asking if this is fair, then the jungle. Wolfe realizes that modern bushmeat is dangerous. That it can kill
answer is hell no. But it is not possi- technology and globalization have my children.” She was also aware that
ble to get hunters and their wives to connected viruses to humanity in dan- there had been an outbreak of Ebola
wear gloves. We try to convince them gerous ways, but he also sees in them recently in Congo. I wondered whether
not to butcher if they have cuts on their an opportunity. “The forces that drove she or her husband had ever seen dead
hands. us into the age of pandemics can also monkeys or gorillas in the forest. She
“The bigger question is what can help prevent them,’’ he said. G.V.F. nodded, gazing at the dark foliage as
we do for these people?’’ he went on. has started to focus on mobile commu- night began to fall.
“How can we help them change their nications—Wolfe considers the accu- “What did you do when you saw
lives? Gloves are going to solve noth- mulation and analysis of “big data’’ a them?” I asked.
ing. These people need economic op- crucial advance for epidemiology. He She turned to me and smiled. “I
portunities and agricultural choices.” recently hired a Stanford medical stu- thanked God, picked them up, and
(One of Wolfe’s colleagues, a medical dent, Lucky Gunasekara, who has a brought them home for dinner,” she
anthropologist, is working on just this background in mobile technology. The said. 
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010 63