Dr. W. Ian Lipkin - A Master Virus Hunter

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin was spending the afternoon prowling his empire of viruses. The Center for Infection and Immunity, which he directs, occupies three floors of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Rather than wait for the elevator, Dr. Lipkin ran up and down the back stairs to move from floor to floor, leaning into the doorways of labs and glass-walled offices to get updates from a platoon of scientists.

“We get 10,000 samples a year easily,” Dr. Lipkin said. “We’ve discovered at least 400 new viruses since I came to Columbia in 2002, and the process is accelerating.”

Over the past 20 years, Dr. Lipkin has built a reputation as a master virus hunter. He has developed ways to quickly identify familiar viruses and ways to search for new ones.

“If scientists are lucky, they’ll identify one novel virus in their whole life,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Lipkin really stands out from the crowd.”

The emergence of H.I.V. in the 1980s first drove Dr. Lipkin to search for viruses. At the time, he was a neurology resident at the University of California, San Francisco, and was watching many patients fall ill with AIDS. It took years for scientists to discover the virus responsible for the disease. Dr. Lipkin worried that in years to come, new viruses would claim more lives because of this lag. “I saw all this, and I said, ‘We have to find new and better ways to do this,’ ” Dr. Lipkin said.

One reason that viruses can be so hard to find is that they’re so small — typically a few millionths of an inch across. Even the most powerful microscopes may not be able to reveal viruses if they’re lurking in a hiding place in the body. Sometimes scientists can detect viruses by rearing vast numbers of them in laboratories. It’s also possible to detect them by looking for antibodies in infected people. But these methods can be slow and unreliable. Dr. Lipkin thought it might be better to find viruses in a different way. He would go fishing for their genes.

“It had never been done before, and it was an obvious thing to do,” he said.

When Dr. Lipkin started finding viruses, the process was agonizingly slow. It took him three years to isolate the borna virus. Now it’s possible to identify new viruses in a matter of days.

Dr. Lipkin and his colleagues are now working with the Department of Defense on even faster methods. In one recent exercise, researchers at the center were shipped two samples of genetic material. Each was a mixture of host DNA and the genes of a rare, dangerous virus. The researchers identified both viruses in six hours.
-Carl Zimmer's NYT article