Pathogen Detection Quotes

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.

One of my motivations to become a blood specialist was to study malaria in red blood cells. But in science, you discover something and you want to go this way, but your work goes that way.

My lab used to do gene expression and genomics, and we did a lot of sequencing samples from virus outbreaks.

What the immune system of man has in its advanced development is what we call immunological memory, so that once it sees something for the first time, when it sees it the second or the third time, it can respond against it in a way that's much more accelerated than when it sees it for the first time.

In the field of biological weapons, there is almost no prospect of detecting a pathogen until it has been used in an attack.

The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.

A more effective international disease surveillance system is essential for global security both against a bioterrorist attack or a naturally occurring disease.

Surveying the way viruses have been discovered in the past, I came to the conclusion that I could use my technology that I developed as a graduate student - DNA microarray technology - to create a chip that would simultaneously screen for all viruses ever discovered, and furthermore have the built-in capability of discovering new viruses.

It turns out that viruses evolve from each other, like everything else. So if you look at the evolutionary tree of viruses, you can find parts of their genome that haven't changed over evolutionary time. You can recognize what may be a new virus by identifying this little piece of their genome that hasn't changed and is represented on the chip.