DAY SEVENTY-SEVEN:Nov. 26:
The Marines have stormed Afghanistan, cloning may not have in fact occurred, the economy (surprise!) is in a recession, Governor-bashing is officially in full swing and a top scientist has mysteriously disappeared from a bridge over the Mississippi.So go today’s headlines.
The President chose to decry human cloning today, as did innumerable members of Congress and the Senate. But yesterday’s announcement by Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts of successful human cell cloning was the source among scientists less of shock than derision. As details of the ACT accomplishments were revealed, researchers all over the country scoffed and sneered, saying the company was all hype and little substance. That ACT failed to maintain viable cloned cells in culture seemed of grave importance to the scientists, but of little consequence to theologians, ethicists and members of the conservative and Catholic constituencies on Capitol Hill. The gauntlet, they said, has been thrown.
The US Marines are neither at the Halls of Monteczuma nor at the Shores of Tripoli, but they did arrive today in several unpronounceable towns deep within Afghanistan. The search is on for Osama bin Laden, and it is becoming obvious that few Afghanis are likely to offer the Saudi safe haven. Throughout Afghanistan foreigners who worked with the Taliban – chiefly Pakistanis, Saudis and Palestinians – have been dragged through the streets, tortured and shot by Afghani fighters and, apparently, average citizens. It seems the Middle Easterners and Pakistani radicals are learning a lesson the Soviets sadly absorbed just over a decade ago: Afghanis don’t take kindly to foreigners mucking about in their affairs. Let us hope the Marines, and all other American forces now on Afghani soil, bear that in mind.
Here in New York the economy dominated conversation, despite the Marine invasion. The state government announced that since September 11 fully 100,000 people in New York City have lost their jobs, or about 3 percent of the adult workforce. These staggering figures were released the same day the National Bureau for Economic Research – the nation’s official arbiter of financial affairs – issued a far less shocking pronouncement: the Ship of State is in a recession. It has been stuck on nasty shoals, the NBER said, since March 2001. And on average, the six sagacious academics of the NBER added, American recessions last 11.2 months, push the GDP down by 2.4 percent and increase unemployment by 2 percent. Remarkably Wall Street took all this as good news, proclaiming that the recession will be over by the end of February, most GDP loss has already occurred and unemployment --- well, a “bit of pain”, as they say, is still to come, but it, too, shall pass.
Having unleashed this arbitrarily rosy spin, the investment community jumped into deep waters and pushed the Dow up by 23.4 points. It wasn’t a headliner day by volatile Dow standards, but it certainly reflected boundless optimism.
Few New Yorkers imagine that this city will rise out of its recession like some spring phoenix. On the contrary, the dimensions of the next major political battle are shaping up and money, or the lack of it, is clearly Issue One. Gov. George C. Pataki faces reelection next year, in his bid for a third term in office, and the Democrats are calling him a fiscal wimp. State Comptroller H. Carl McCall said today that Pataki has become an “idle bystander” in the fight for federal aid to help New York recover from the Sept. 11 attacks. And McCall’s fellow Democrat – who also want’s Pataki’s seat – joined the foray today. He’s former federal Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, the elder son of former Gov. Mario Cuomo, who has also been screaming about Pataki’s failure to put the White House’s feet to the fiscal fire.
The White House promised to quickly provide New York with just over half the originally allocated $20 billion and has said the rest of the money, and possibly more, will come later. But New York members of Congress say the nation is quickly forgetting about New York, and moves are afoot both on Capitol Hill and at the White House to shift the meager sums elsewhere. I say “meager” because official estimates of the cost of September 11 to the city and state now top $160 million. Pataki had asked Washington for a $54 billion aid package, but Washington laughed it off because he Governor slid in line items for every pie-in-the-sky program he had ever promised his upstate constituents, including light rail systems for Buffalo and Rochester. Congress could see that he was using the World Trade Center disaster to get funds to fulfill old campaign promises.
“The governor should be down in Washington pounding on doors and fighting for New York. He should be lobbying his friend, President Bush, to fulfill the promises he made,” McCall declared. “The governor’s silence is anything but golden. Most of all, the governor must be at the center of New York’s bipartisan strategic alliance, not an idle bystander.”
The Governor’s aide responded “New York has been there for America ... We’re confident America will be there for New York.”
Maybe he is confident, but savvy New Yorkers are anxious, indeed. The more time elapses, the greater the possibility, they say, that America will turn its back on Gotham.
Meanwhile, there was the suspicious case of microbiologist Don Wiley to divert.
One of the nation’s most prestigious infectious diseases scientists, often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, Wiley disappeared last week under mysterious circumstances in Memphis, Tennessee. Because Wiley worked at Harvard University on aspects of such pathogens as influenza, HIV and Ebola the FBI and Memphis police said yesterday that they are pursuing his case as a homicide, possibly linked in some way to bioterrorism.
FBI Memphis office chief William Woerner said that the bioterrorism link might be a stretch, but given the current atmosphere in America, coupled with the deeply enigmatic nature of the case, the agency is not discounting the possibility that somebody targeted Wiley because they thought he might be a source of either microbes, or vital viral information.
Wiley was one of he world’s leading experts on the detailed chemical mechanisms viruses use to gain entry into human cells. And on the ways human antibodies distinguish between nasty invaders – such as flu viruses – and a person’s own cells and proteins. For this work Wiley, at the comparatively youthful age of 57, has already received three of the most prestigious awards a biologist can possibly attain: the Japan Prize, the Lasker Award and a Howard Hughes chair with guaranteed research funding. Wiley’s meteoric career spanned 30 years at Harvard, from undergraduate to chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Together with Harvard collaborator Dr. Jack Strominger, Wiley was considered a likely shoe-in for a future Nobel Prize. “It was spectacular work. It was just a great collaboration,” Strominger told me, speaking of the research he did with Wiley between 1981-1996. “He is a great scientist! Very dedicated. Very precise. Very good at peripheral vision – you know, knowing what to do next. I just have no clues as to what could have happened.”
All of which makes the November 16 disappearance of Wiley in Memphis much more mysterious. On Nov. 15 Wiley flew down to Memphis, rented a car and drove to the posh Peabody Hotel for a meeting of the board of scientific advisors for St. Jude’s Hospital. The meeting finished sometime in the late evening. At 4am Wiley’s rental car was found some five minutes away from the Peabody, sitting in the middle of the De Soto Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River. His keys were still in the ignition, the tank was full of gas, and there was no sign of a struggle, police say. Wiley, who had planned to spend the evening at his father’s home in nearby Germantown, left no note, nor any outward indications of suicidal intent, according to Strominger, Wiley’s wife, Katrin Valgeirsdottir and colleagues. On the contrary, colleagues found Wiley, “friendly, energetic, incredibly dynamic,” microbiologist Robert Doms of the University of Pennsylvania told me.
While the Coast Guard combed the Mississippi yesterday looking for Wiley’s body, FBI agents searched his scientific background for clues. But colleagues say it is a far stretch to imagine anyone attacking Wiley in hopes of obtaining deadly microbes, or learning how to grow them: “He never grew viruses. He didn’t even know how to grow viruses,” Strominger said.
His work did not involve vast frozen stores of hibernating lethal microbes. Rather, Wiley used X-ray devices to decipher the structures of proteins found on viruses. Using the X-ray crystallography technique Wiley deciphered the three dimensional structures of influenza, polio and common cold viruses. And, working with Strominger, figured out exactly how the immune system determines that a cell is friendly, and should not be attacked. That work led to understanding how the immune system goes awry, attacking people’s own cells and causing such autoimmune diseases as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
It seems unlikely, indeed, that anyone could possibly have imagined Wiley would be a source for either microbes or the information necessary to weaponize germs. Only an idiot would think…..
On the other hand, his last couple of papers concerned the three dimensional structure of a protein used by the Ebola virus to invade human cells.
Perhaps some idiot thinks that knowing the X-ray crystallographic structure of a protein is the equivalent of having possession of the virus from which it is derived and knowledge of how to infect hundreds or thousands of people. Wiley, it seems, had neither.
I shall sleep well tonight, convinced that nobody succeeded in obtaining nightmarish information from Don C. Wiley. His disappearance, however, remains distressing because he is a spectacular scientist.
Be well. Stay safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
