OHI – Michael Lairmore, Dean, Veterinary Medicine

“Nature is based on harmony. So it says if we want to survive and become more like nature, then we actually have to understand that it’s cooperation versus competition.” —Bruce Lipton

Homo sapiens, the dominant species on planet Earth, has a growing impact on the natural systems that all living species depend upon to exist. The challenges we face are not all regionally defined; they involve global systems to produce safe and sustainable food sources to feed an expanded population, control and prevent infectious trans-boundary diseases, and limit the negative effects of climate change on interlinked ecosystems.

As a result, how we cooperate across geographic, political, and cultural boundaries will determine our collective future. To educate the next generation of healthcare workers capable of addressing societal needs, our approaches to train this workforce must adapt to create professionals that bring together multiple disciplines with knowledge and skills to solve complex problems at the interface of people, animals, and the environments we share.

“Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”. –Stephen Hawking

While sitting in a laboratory meeting as a Ph.D. student, my advisor brought us an image of a virus particle that all of the graduate students recognized as a retrovirus, specifically the genus of retroviruses called “lentiviruses.” We knew this because these viruses plagued veterinary medicine for decades, causing a variety of chronic animal diseases, well known to veterinarians. What surprised us and the world at the time, was that the virus was isolated from patients suffering from a new human epidemic eventually known as AIDS. The world for me changed almost overnight and I dedicated my career to studying these deadly viruses of animals and people.

Researchers collecting samples from a bat

PREDICT’s Ebola Host Project team safely and humanely collect samples from bats in the field. The team is active in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, where teams are sampling wildlife and domestic animals to learn more about potential host species for ebolaviruses. (Jaber Belkhiria/UC Davis)

This past week, one of our research teams lead by Dr. Tracey Goldstein described the discovery of a new strain of Ebola virus from bats in Sierra Leone. As with most scientific investigations, the new virus was discovered by a collaborative team effort that included our One Health Institute, well as colleagues at Columbia University. As I spoke to Dr. Goldstein about the discovery, she became expressive, excited, but restrained at the same time, trying to contain her sense of discovery with her analytical side as a professor whose job it is to identify the origin of viruses like Ebola. Her motivation was in context to the vivid reality that the most recent Ebola outbreak in 2013-2016 killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa. While this new virus may not be the origin of that outbreak, her team’s work provides more evidence that bats are a likely host for these deadly human viruses and opens new questions in their goal to prevent global pandemics.

Dean's Perspectives

Tag: OHI

Collaboration Required to Solve Global Problems

Enlightenment Through Scientific Discovery