Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

Tariq Zamani, Peter Blair and Ashley Reyer

Assistant Professor of Biology Peter Blair (center) helps Atiq Zamani prepare his PowerPoint presentation on the United Nations’ response to the bird flu threat while Ashley Reyer gets ready to discuss the changes required at the molecular level for bird flu to mutate into a form that can be transmitted human-to-human.

RICHMOND, Ind. — The young scientists in Earlham College biology professor Peter Blair’s immunology course had a lot of extra work this semester, and they didn’t mind one bit.

Beyond learning the basic workings of the human immune system — including cells and tissues and the concepts of activation, differentiation and specificity, as well as effector mechanisms, autoimmunity, immunodeficiency and AIDS — each of Blair’s 19 biology or biochemistry majors also is reporting the results of an individual research project into the emerging bird flu crisis. Reflective of the interdisciplinary nature of inquiry at the College, only half of those studies are related to the biology of a potential avian flu pandemic. Other research looks at “What are the current plans/strategies for containment?” “What are the effects on economies if a pandemic is reached?” and “What is the World Health Organization’s response?”

“It’s going well beyond the true definition of an immunology course,” says Blair, a member of the Earlham faculty since 2004, who in alternating semesters also teaches courses in microbiology and parasitology. “Every time I teach I try to look for something that ties the subject into a larger context,” Blair adds, having hit the jackpot in that effort with his choice of bird flu for this fall’s offering of BIO 343.

“It’s certainly been extremely timely,” not to mention good for his reputation among his students for being “on it,” Blair says.

When he first contemplated — last summer — adding an examination of bird flu as a component of his current immunology class dire predictions of a global outbreak of the virus among humans did not yet figure prominently and regularly in the newspapers, news magazines, and on the networks, says Blair. President Bush was months away from proposing his administration’s multi-billion-dollar preparedness and response plan and major governments around the world had yet to threaten closing their borders to both trade and tourists if person-to-person transmission of a human variant of the flu was identified as a real danger.

“It wasn’t quite topical at that point,” Blair observes wryly. He explains his own interest was raised by a reference made in a NOVA program he’d seen; it suggested that some scientists and public health officials were more concerned about a possible pandemic sparked by bird flu than they were about the continuing worldwide spread of HIV-AIDS.

“I hadn’t heard that before,” says Blair, whose initial plan for the course was to merely examine the bird flu threat — then being reported largely in the scientific community — in terms of the devastating effects of the last great influenza pandemic, which in 1918 claimed as many lives (at least 20 million and perhaps as many as five times that number) in 24 weeks as HIV/AIDS has taken in the past 24 years. “As a biologist I thought, ‘It’s about time for a pandemic to re-occur,’” adds the University of Notre Dame Ph.D., “and as a lifelong learner I thought, ‘This is something I need to know more about.’”

“I thought it was kind of a weird one,” says Austin, Texas, junior Doug Hardesty, recounting his reaction to Blair’s announcement at the start of the school year that in addition to the normal syllabus the class also would be looking specifically at avian flu. “I thought why not something ‘big’ like HIV/AIDS or even malaria. Right now, though, I’m really glad we picked this topic.”

It was about three weeks into the semester, Hardesty says, that the mainstream media — “secondary literature” to scientists — starting catching the bird flu bug. From that point on, the coursework got “pretty intense” as Hardesty and his classmates tried to keep pace with the headlines while preparing 10-minute PowerPoint presentations on various aspects of a global calamity most scientists in the field regard as not so much a question of “if,” as “when.”

“It hasn’t quite overtaken the class,” says Blair. “But, it has been a really nice complementary route of study and, maybe, a valuable lesson about keeping current on developments not just in science, but also in the world.”

The text he’s using for this semester’s immunology class is a sixth edition, Blair points out. Just a decade ago, when he was an undergraduate, the volume was only in its second printing.

“So, that’s what, four revisions in 10 years? That’s just one indication of how quickly things are advancing in this area,” says Blair. He’s concerned, as well, about the speed at which humans traverse the world today as compared to 1918 and how that might translate in the event of a fresh pandemic to a global population grown from 1.8 billion to more than six billion in less than a century. A new outbreak affecting the same percentage of the population as did the 1918 pandemic would kill a minimum of 70 million people and perhaps as many as 250 million.

As a “med guy” Hardesty, who plans to pursue medical school after graduating from Earlham, chose for his research project a review of the current state of clinical treatment for the H5N1 or avian flu virus now of concern in areas from China and Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe. However, he says he’s been more impressed with the work of a classmate, David Courtney, a junior from Bloomington, Ind., who examined points of international law and their possible bearing, for good or ill, on global response to the looming public health emergency.

“We’d been talking in class about ‘Big Pharma,’ kind of our term for a collective group of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, and the politics behind it,” Hardesty says, “and so he (Courtney) talked about how India has decided to go ahead and produce this certain vaccine, even though a Swiss company holds a patent on the drug.

“Essentially, they (government and health officials in India) looked and saw that they have the operational capacity to make this vaccine and so that’s what they’re going to. So, there’s this huge ethical dilemma right there in front. There’s the legal precedent, but what about saving lives? It was a really fascinating presentation about, of all things, compulsory patent license.”

Although he doesn’t expect being so prescient when choosing the “context” for his immunology course the next time, Blair says he’s looking forward to making the attempt.

“Earlham students have a wide range of concerns,” he says, “and there aren’t too many courses here that focus on just one subject or set of events. I never thought this issue would get as big as it has, so it only shows again that it’s not always just about the science, or just about the politics, or just about the money…

“Living consciously in the world today means knowing how things happening in one situation can influence other things — sometimes many things — somewhere else. It’s critical to have that broader awareness.”

Contact:
Peter Blair, assistant professor of biology
765/983-1517 — E-Mail Peter